Dark Star, Book 2
by Onyx
Summary: An alternate universe Dragonball Epic focusing on Piccolo and his strange conversion. A continuation of Dark Star, Book 1.
1. Chapter 1

Author's Note: Well, here we go again. This story basically picks up right where Book 1 left off. Here's hoping this book goes more quickly than the first one did.

Piccolo's landing wasn't easy when he at last came back to the wilderness. It wasn't a crash by any stretch, but it jarred his knees and caused him to stumble half a step. He was exhausted, head to foot, in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with chi.

He straightened his back slowly, feeling sore muscles and fresh wounds cramp in protest. Then, he looked around, not even sure of where he'd landed. It was a rough-looking place – tall bluffs, scrub brush, sand…he was at the edge of the Sahara, just south of Egypt. _I must have been flying all night, _he thought with some surprise. It had only felt like a little while, but then again, he had been…_Go on and say it, _he thought sourly. _You were in shock. _

As if to punctuate that statement, the boy that he held in the crook of his left arm made a soft, whimpering sound in his sleep and clutched onto his tunic. Piccolo looked down for a moment, a little surprised to realize that he'd almost forgotten he'd picked the damn kid up in the first place.

"What do I do with you now," he muttered. It was ironic. Piccolo had always prided himself on having a clear head, planning each step with the careful attention that every warrior should use. Maybe that had been why Son Goku had been so difficult for him to defeat; the man seemed never to have a plan at all, instead flying by instinct or intuition – something that Piccolo would never have trusted. It had made him unpredictable as an opponent, and infuriating as an ally. Even for as briefly as they'd worked together, Piccolo couldn't count the number of times he'd been driven to the point of outburst by Son's seeming inability to understand the simple concept of action vs. reaction. And after all of the times he'd blown up at Son Goku for not thinking things through, here he was, the great demon Piccolo, alone in the wilderness with the five-year-old, half-breed child of his mortal enemy, and no plan. Plan, Hell, he didn't even have a _motive_ that he could name…or a goal.

For the first time in his life, Piccolo was so completely lost that he didn't even know where he was _trying_ to go.

There was nothing to do but assess the situation.

Item One: Son Goku is dead. There's no point in trying to kill him anymore.

Item Two: He, Piccolo, has just been in a no-holds-barred fight with his oldest brother, Cymbal, in which they were both trying very hard to kill each other. Going home is probably pointless, too. Or rather, still pointless, because he hasn't been able to go there for a good long while now.

_Bunch of assholes, anyway, _he thought, and moved onto the next item, which was…

Item Three: One or more of his brothers is bound to try to off either him or the kid sooner or later. Probably both.

Item Four: He has no idea why he has the kid.

_Is that all? _ he wondered, tilting his head back to look at the sky, which was already graying with dawn. No, there was one more thing.

Item Six: Sooner or later, Son Goku's friends were going to want to try to wish him back. And wouldn't _that_ be fun.

Piccolo didn't know yet whether or not he should allow his mortal enemy to be whished back to life. He'd been trying so hard to kill Son Goku for so long – and then his goal had, very literally, fallen into his lap, shot from behind by someone else. It should have been the best day of his life. Instead, it felt more like the worst. It was nothing that Piccolo could have explained in simple words. If asked to describe it, he would have said that it was a lot like getting a sword rammed into your gut…but the hole doesn't heal, it just stays there, deep and empty.

Maybe, the former demon reflected, it was just that he liked routine. It was hard to understand that he was never going to fight the man again, never going to have one of those infuriating talks where Son Goku tried futilely to convince him of the error of his ways, never again lie awake at night and wonder why the person he had tried the hardest to kill was the one who had tried the hardest to "help" him.

_I want him back, _he realized with sudden, stomach-sinking dismay. Even thinking that sucked what strength was left out of his legs – his knees nearly gave. How in the Hell do you _miss_ your enemy? But he did, so much that it hurt. He'd never _missed _anyone before, at least not with that kind of intensity.

Likewise, he'd never felt like such an utter failure. What kind of maladjusted freak _misses _his arch nemesis? He was pretty sure that Freud would have had a sicko field day with that…but berating himself was NOT going to help. He needed rest, and he needed cover – and he needed enough time to sort out what he was going to do next. But first…he needed to deal with the kid.

Realizing that he was well beyond the stage of his life where he would have simply killed the obnoxious little milk sucker did nothing to improve his mood.

"You," he growled. "Wake up."

The boy didn't so much as stir. He had fainted some time ago, and at some point during their flight, it seemed to have turned into a genuine, deep sleep.

Rolling his eyes in less-than-subtle irritation, Piccolo took the boy by the scruff of the shirt he was wearing, held him out at arm's length, and gave him a solid shake. His only response was a muffled snore.

"Figures," he muttered under his breath. He gave real consideration to just punting the kid, but something that might work better caught his eye. The aforementioned something was a stream running between the rocks, clear and clean and probably cold as all Hell. It was exactly what Piccolo needed.

Smirking wickedly, he walked over to the water…going so far as to wade in as far as his knees. The water was as cold as he'd hoped – even _his_ skin started to burn as soon as it seeped through his boots.

"Consider this your wakeup call," he said as he dropped the child squarely into the still part of the stream.

The reaction was predictably explosive. Gohan came up screaming and coughing, thrashing uselessly at the air like a cat pitched into a well. Piccolo watched the display with growing ire for several seconds before he finally snapped, "ENOUGH!" in a voice loud enough to shake the scrub bushes on the shore.

The boy froze, hands stilled in the act of clawing at the air, and stared up at Piccolo with huge, soap-bubble eyes. He couldn't even seem to gather enough of his wits together to ask a question. Instead, the boy began to sputter. "Wh…wh…wh…"

Piccolo crossed his arms, well aware that he was only intimidating the kid more, and glared down at him. "Spit it out," he said.

"Wh-where a-am I?" Gohan finally managed.

Piccolo smirked. "Nowhere you want to be."

Gohan was regaining his composure. He crossed his arms too, though it looked like he was trying harder to conserve heat than to look imposing. His lips were even starting to turn blue. "Why did you take me?" he asked in a voice teetering between hurt and bewilderment.

It was a tone that Piccolo was well familiar with – he'd heard it enough from the boy's father. Feeling his nose line in deep snarl creases, Piccolo said, "Because you weren't safe where you were."

"But my mom…"

"Can't protect you," Piccolo said.

Gohan bit his lip. "So…you're going to protect me?" he asked.

That brought Piccolo up short for a fraction of a second. Had that really been his intention? Was he really that far gone? But the answer came just as quickly. Piccolo smirked. "No," he said. "From now on, Gohan – you're going to have to protect yourself."

Gohan's eyes went wide as sacuers. "Me? B-but I'm just a kid! I can't…"

Piccolo cut him off impatiently. "Do you really think your enemies are going to care how old you are?" he asked.

"I…I didn't think I had enemies. I haven't done anything to.."

"You do have enemies," Piccolo shot back coldly. "Or your father did. That's the same thing."

Gohan swallowed harshly – Piccolo could hear it from where he was standing. Still, the former demon didn't say anything. It was time to see what the boy was made of.

For the longest moment, Gohan said nothing at all. He shivered…he sniffled…he even seemed to grow smaller, standing up to almost his chest in the cold water, Goosebumps rising on his pale arms…but finally, the boy looked up at him, eyes wet with unshed tears. "I'll do my best, sir," he said.

"Good," Piccolo said…turning his back on the boy, and striding out of the stream. "Then start walking." He didn't look behind him to see if the boy was following. He could hear the scrambling behind him as Gohan clumsily slogged out of the water. Piccolo snorted. He'd seen rhinos with more grace…but they'd fix that.

First, though, the boy needed some toughening up. And since they needed to find better cover, Piccolo figured he could kill two birds with one stone. It wasn't like it would kill the kid or anything.

* * *

The stronghold in the Tsumi Tsubris had never exactly been a hub of activity… but in the time since Cymbal had returned half-dead from his latest venture into the world at large, the old fortress had been even less exciting than usual. An eerie silence had settled over the walls and the turrets, making the lone disturbance of wind blowing snow against the great stones all the more pronounced. 

Piano was leaning back against one such wall, knee deep in snow, and not really giving that much thought. He inclined his head so that he could see the tower where Tambourine had unofficially taken up residence. Normally, Piano was about as interested in that wing of the fortress as most people are in international torture chambers…but this past few days had been different. "He still hasn't come out," he said.

Drum looked up from what he was doing – namely, drawing in the snow with a stick he must have picked up. "Cymbal, you mean?"

"Yeah." Piano's eyes narrowed, as if he could squint through the windows of that tower. Maybe he could have, if they hadn't been converted to stained glass at some point in the near past. "He's never been down this long."

That was true enough. Injuries weren't an occupational hazard when your life consisted of fighting – they were an occupational certainty. Practically a job requirement. However, the rapid healing rate and the regenerative abilities of their kind usually insured that even after a severe beating, the brothers would be back in fighting trim within a day or two.

Cymbal had been down for nearly four. Drum cast a nervous glance at the far tower. "It's not like him," he said, his rough tone bewildered.

"No," Piano agreed. "So either he's playing us, or.."

"Or it's _real _bad," Drum finished. There was a loaded pause between them. "Y'don't think maybe he's dyin,' do you?" he asked. Frankly, he was worried. Cymbal had been leading their little band since Daimaou had died years before. Granted, he hadn't been as competent OR as powerful as Daimaou had been – but he'd given them a task to do in his absence. Drum didn't like him. He was pretty sure Piano didn't like him, and Piccolo, well, that was obvious even to him. That was all beside the point. Cymbal gave them orders...he'd been the only one of them who'd had the presence of mind to issue any. Without him, how would they know what to do?

"Suppose he is," Piano answered nonchalantly. "Maybe that wouldn't be so bad."

Drum blinked. "Who'd lead us?"

Piano chuckled. "Nobody. Think about it. We could do things our way for a while."

"The same things we were doin' before, you mean," Drum said. He was trying to wrap his head around it. No plans, no orders… "How would we keep from messin' up?"

Piano snorted. "I'd help you know what to do, wouldn't I? Besides. What if we DID mess up. Who'd punish us?"

Drum thought about that for another minute. "Nobody," he said. "But why're we thinkin' about this? Maybe he's not even dying. Maybe it's just takin' longer than usual for him to get over this."

There was another loaded pause where Drum sensed that something big was going to happen. Piano looked straight at him and smirked…but when he spoke, it was still in a hushed voice, as if he were trying not to be heard. As if he just barely dared to say it. "Supposing we helped him along."

"You want we should kill him?" Drum shot back in an equally low tone, glancing up furtively…half afraid that his eldest brother would come crashing down on them at any second.

"Who's going to stop us? The bookworm? It'd be just us, then. Think about it."

Drum was _already_ thinking about it. No more rules. No more uneven fights. No more hard training early in the mornings or guard duties at night. It was, he was deciding, kind of appealing.

He smirked. "Maybe," he said.

Piano laughed under his breath. "Maybe," he agreed.

* * *

Piccolo rolled his eyes heavenward at the sound of a very distinctive thud – one that he'd come to recognize, over the past few hours, as the sound of a five-year-old child whose legs had given out on him yet again. 

_I should have seen this coming, _he thought, sourly_. What the Hell was I expecting – a clone? A miracle? A brat who_ _could walk for more than half an hour without collapsing, whining, or just generally being a pain in the ass?_

The demon sighed. The truth was, he hadn't expected anything. He hadn't been thinking, really, when he'd picked up Goku's son and taken off with him. At least, not thinking in the conventional way. The only real thing that had been in his head was the rough sense that, once Cymbal got back to the stronghold, someone would be coming for that kid. Someone would want him dead, to squash the last bit of threat that Son Goku represented.

Piccolo still had trouble believing that Son Goku was dead. The man had been a very central part of his life since it began – the goal to strive toward, the obstacle to overcome, the wrench periodically thrown into the plans, the never-ending source of frustration and confusion…the only person he'd ever really talked to. Gone. Just like that.

Well, the demon reflected, maybe not just like that. It had been a drawn-out process. There had first been the fights with Goku's long-lost freak of an alien brother, mostly caused by Gohan being kidnapped. Of course, no sooner had they fought _that _monster off than they had to go retrieve the boy again, this time from the stronghold far to the north. Then there had been the battle with Cymbal, the transformation – all this before the energy blast from behind had ended Son Goku's life.

Why that wasn't alright with him, Piccolo was just beginning to sound out. Like the ocean floor, the reason was well-hidden, buried under layers and layers of water and self-denial…but his first mental forays into it were starting to give him the shape of the thing, dark and ominous and full of caverns. He didn't like the look of it at all, and so he did his best not to think about it.

Still, at times like this, it was all but impossible. For just a moment, Piccolo closed his eyes against the heat of the desert sun, feeling the raw force of it of it seeping into him like the air before a chi blast. The emptiness echoed around him like a gong, resonating in every part of him. Irritably, he pushed it aside – he couldn't let it swallow him. He had to go on, pull himself together, keep moving until he could get his feet back under him – and, while he was at it, he had to get that useless brat onto his feet, too.

The demon stopped walking, not bothering to turn around.

For a second or two, the boy didn't say anything; the air was filled with the sound of his panting. "Mr. Piccolo," the boy said at last in a thin voice, "haven't we walked far enough today?"

"You'd rather fight instead," Piccolo growled. He was satisfied to be able to almost hear Gohan's flinch. The boy needed some discipline, and intimidation was just the way to do it.

"No, sir," the boy answered hurriedly. "I just don't know if I can walk anymore is all…"

"You can. Get up."

"But…"

Piccolo rounded on him, glaring down at the smallish figure that was sitting on the ground, legs tucked up like a dropped apple. "You can ALWAYS get back up, boy," he snapped. "It's just a question of what it's worth to you."

The boy thought about that for a minute. His pale face – too pale and soft for the hard air of the desert - scrunched up with concentration. And, finally, he climbed to his feet. "I'm ready sir," he said, a little sullenly.

"I doubt that," Piccolo muttered, but he continued walking, knowing that Gohan was following. The boy had nowhere else to go – and no choice.

Piccolo knew exactly how he felt.

* * *

Son Goku sighed theatrically as he stared down the entire length of powderpuff souls that still stood between him and his final judgment. "Can't we make this thing go any faster?" he asked the aging deity who stood beside him. 

"We are all bound by the rules of the afterlife, Son Goku. Even me," Kami said. Son distinctly detected a note of impatience in his voice. Apparently even god found the long wait tiresome.

"Yeah, but jeeze, we've been here for hours."

"Days," Kami muttered.

"Days then," Goku amended. "Anyway, it's been a long time, and I'm starting to get hungry."

"You're dead," the guardian of earth pronounced tiredly. "You aren't supposed to get hungry."

"You know that, and I know that," Goku said. "But just try telling it to my stomach."

"It's good to know that some things go beyond even death," Kami responded in a sarcastic tone that even Piccolo might have been proud of.

Goku was just about to ask how being hungry could ever fall into the "good" category when he was interrupted by a small, clerklike demon. This apparition was blue-skinned from head to polished shoe, clipboard proffered before him like a weapon. "Kami-sama?" the demon asked through his nose. "King Yamma will see you now."

"King Yamma?" Goku asked.

"Shh," Kami responded, voice so low that even the clerk didn't seem to hear it. "Be quiet. This is an important person, Goku, and we need his help."

"Oh."

The clerk demon began walking…and Kami began following…so Goku decided he was probably supposed to follow, too. He took the time to see if stepping a few feet away had changed the scenery at all. It really hadn't. Son Goku was sort of worried to see that the afterlife was mainly composed of fluffy pink and yellow clouds. That was nice and everything, but he was pretty sure that he'd get really bored with it if he were around long enough. Which he probably would be, given that he was dead and everything.

The doors that they walked through into the judgment place were huge. It reminded him of the temple his grandpa had lived in, with all the arches and pillars. The whole place just _felt_ religious…and it made Goku uncomfortable in a "which parts do I stand for and what do I do with this piece of bread," sort of way.

"Well, what have we here," a voice boomed. Goku looked up. At a desk that was easily the size of most houses was a very strange being. He was monstrous, bigger even than the Ox King, and inkpen red. The large man tilted his bay-window-sized glasses further down on his nose and squinted. "Kami, I'm very busy here. Can this wait?"

Kami bowed respectfully. "I beg your pardon, King Yamma, but this is very urgent. The earth may be in terrible danger."

"I can't wait to hear this," Yamma said, putting his elbow on the great desk, and putting his chin in his palm. "Go on, tell me how you're going to ruin my day."

Kami chuckled nervously. "You see, there's a very great threat coming to earth, King Yamma. And this man, Son Goku, is our only hope. As you can see, he's quite dead right now, but there are ways…"

"Wait," King Yamma said. He looked down at his book, and his great brow furrowed. "That," he said, pointing at Goku, "is Son Goku?"

Clearing his throat, Kami said, "Yes, King Yamma."

"And he's dead?"

"As a doornail, I'm afraid."

King Yamma shook his head and sat back. "That's terrible news."

"I'll say," Goku responded. "Though it really doesn't seem to be so bad once you get used to it, so.."

Kami elbowed him in the side. "That's why we need your help, sir. You see, the world is…"

"He shouldn't be here," Yamma said.

Goku thought that was probably more a problem with the clerk-demon than with either him or Kami, but he decided to keep his mouth shut. Kami, meanwhile, bowed slightly. "You're right, sir…by rights, he should have gone straight to heaven, but circumstances…"

"No," Yamma said. His voice wasn't thunderous or angry so much as it was confused. "I mean he shouldn't be _here,_ in the afterlife."

Goku blinked. "You mean I'm not dead?" he asked.

"No," King Yamma said again, his great brow furrowing deeper. "You've definitely died. The only problem is that, according to this, you weren't supposed to."

Kami recovered first. "He wasn't supposed to die yet, you mean."

"That's right. According to this book, young man…" Yamma said, removing his glasses entirely and leaning back in his chair, "you're about four years too early."


	2. Chapter 2

After King Yamma's pronouncement, the reception room of the afterlife fell eerily silent. Goku normally wouldn't have minded asking questions in even such a formal situation, but he was so confused that he couldn't even decide what to ask. Besides that, the situation felt dangerous…not in the someone's-going-to-beat-you-up sense, but in a different way, one that Goku had never felt before except, maybe, right before he'd decided not to kill Piccolo all those years ago. It was a feeling like the whole world was balanced on the edge of a quarter and that what happened in the next few seconds could change everything, forever.

Of the two of them, Kami recovered from the shock first. "What do you mean, he's four years too early?" the old diety asked in a strained voice.

"I mean," King Yamma said, "that your friend here…" the gatekeeper of the afterlife leveled a redwood-sized finger at Goku.. "died two days ago. But he wasn't supposed to. Do you understand?"

"Great Yamma, how does that happen?" Kami asked. "I thought that matters of life and death were decided by fate…and unchangeable."

"They are," King Yamma growled.

"Then how did…"

"I don't KNOW," the gate keeping diety roared suddenly, slamming a massive fist down on his desk with earth-quaking force. "This has never happened before! Not ever in the history of the universe!"

Kami recoiled at the other's outburst…and even Goku felt a little shaken at the sheer volume of sound…but he wanted answers badly enough by then to actually just ask. "Excuse me," he said. "King Yamma?"

The massive red deity turned his eyes to Goku. "What?" he barked.

"If I wasn't supposed to die when I did – then when was I supposed to die, and how?"

King Yamma pounded his fist down on his desk. "NO man may know his manner of death before his time! That is one of the oldest and most hallowed rules in the cosmos."

"Well," Goku said, putting his hand behind his head, "I understand you can't know when you're gonna die, but…does it really matter now? I mean, I can't change anything now that I'm already dead."

Both King Yamma and Kami stared at him for a moment. Then, King Yamma leaned back in his seat, seeming to go over this idea in his head.

Goku could see Kami crossing his fingers.

After a few seconds, King Yamma sighed. "Well, why the Hell not," he muttered under his breath, opening his great book and thumbing through a few pages. "According to this, you are to die in your sleep exactly four years from today."

Goku blinked. "That's it?"

"Yes, that's it. What were you expecting, a fanfare?" Yamma asked.

"Wait a minute…I'm not even all that old. Are you really sure I just died?" Goku asked. To tell the truth, he felt sort of let down. He'd always figured that if he died, it'd be in a fight.

"Oh no," King Yamma replied calmly. "Though there was a bit more to it than that.

"Well…what was it, then?"

King Yamma closed the book. "Let me be a little more clear, Son Goku. According to this, it was supposed to have been at the hand of your old enemy, Piccolo, who shot you while you were sleeping. You can't really ask for better than that, can you? It's classic."

Goku's jaw dropped. He would almost have been less surprised to hear that Chichi had been meant to end his life while he wasn't looking – or Krillen, or Yamcha. "Piccolo?" he asked. "Are you sure?"

"It's written right here," Yamma said, "plain as day."

"Well, then that explains everything," Goku said. "Things had to change because the book was wrong."

"Young man," King Yamma said, "this book has been dictating fate for millennia. What reason would YOU have to doubt it?"

"Because Piccolo wouldn't kill me," Goku responded, surprised at how sure he was of that very fact. "Even if he doesn't know that yet," he added almost as an afterthought. "He would have once, I'm pretty sure…but that was a while back. He's changed now – so maybe history had to change, too."

King Yamma pinched the bridge of his nose. "Naive sort, is he?" he asked Kami.

"To my everlasting consternation," Kami replied levelly. "But great Yamma, we've taken up so much of your time now…"

"I'll say," Yamma growled.

Kami cleared his throat awkwardly and forged on. "I want to talk to you about Snake Way."

"No," Yamma said.

"But sir, the situation is dire. A great threat looms over earth, and…"

"Threat?" Goku asked. "What new threat?" But he was, of course, ignored.

"I've GIVEN you my answer, Kami," Yamma interrupted. "You're simply too old for such a journey."

Goku blinked. "Are you going somewhere?" he asked of his former mentor.

"He most assuredly is NOT!" Yamma snapped.

Kami buried his face in his hands and drew a deep breath. Goku knew this gesture well – he'd seen it many times before, when his training had pushed Kami nearly to the point of taking up needlepoint or backgammon…or some other hobby less frustrating than the molding of young warriors. "Forgive me for being unclear, sir. I don't want to go onto snake way. Son Goku does."

"He does?" Yamma asked incredulously.

"…I do?" Goku asked, after which Kami elbowed him solidly in the ribs.

"He does," Kami said with certainty.

"Oh," the gatekeeper said. "Well, why didn't you say so? Of course he can go."

"Go _where_?" Goku asked.

"I'll explain on the way," Kami growled under his breath, taking him by the arm and hauling him bodily toward the exit.

On the way out, Goku turned a little and waved at King Yamma. "Thanks for everything!" He called back almost as an afterthought.

It seemed to him that, as he left, he heard the gatekeeper of the afterlife mutter one word to himself with the air of one who was counting the centuries until retirement: "Earthlings."

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Gohan was so relieved when they made camp that night that he didn't even have the energy to ask where they were. He just flopped down where he stood, arms splayed, staring up at the unfamiliar, graying sky. The sky at home had never looked like that. Above his old house, the sky had been hazy sometimes like a picture smudged with cotton; it had always looked soft, with ice-cream clouds and deep blues. Here, the air was clear all the way up, especially in the evenings; even the clouds looked like something you could cut yourself on. Struck with a sudden wave of homesickness, Gohan swiped a hand quickly across his eyes, hoping that Mr. Piccolo hadn't seen them water.

"Don't you dare," Piccolo growled.

Gohan swallowed nervously and rubbed his eyes again to make sure that all the water was gone. "Sorry, sir," he said, sitting up. His legs had never hurt so bad in his life, but he knew better than to bring THAT up.

Piccolo didn't tell him it was okay like mom and dad did when he did something wrong. In fact, he didn't say anything at all. He just made a low "hmph" sound in the back of his throat and sat down. Gohan wondered if that meant that Piccolo was still mad at him. He bet he was.

Actually, as far as Gohan could tell, Piccolo never _stopped_ being mad. His face was always set in a scowl, his hands were always fisted, and even if it wasn't for that, he would've seemed mad. It was like he projected "mad" waves, punctuated by occasional spikes of "leave me alone."

Gohan wasn't used to that. Sure, his mom was mad sometimes – a lot of the time, if he was being honest, but it was always for a reason, and it never lasted long. Krillen, from what Gohan had seen, was a little nervous and jumpy, but he seemed happy enough. And his dad, well – Dad was always happy. He had a big grin that made Gohan and everyone else want to grin back at him, and Goku's laugh could even bring his mom out of a bad mood sometimes. Now that he thought about it…he mostly knew people who were happy.

There was no way to construe Piccolo as "happy." Gohan shifted a little so that he could look at his strange new companion. Piccolo was sitting a few feet in the air with his legs crossed lotus-style – _wow, I wonder how he does that? – _with his head pitched forward a little. Both of Piccolo's eyes were closed, both his arms were crossed. He was perfectly still in the air, aside from the slight flutter of his cape. Gohan wondered if he was actually asleep, feeling a little guilty for staring so hard. But, when the other didn't move at all, he decided he really was sleeping. He even scowled in his sleep.

Feeling a little relieved, Gohan took the opportunity to study the other's face. It was green, of course, but it was also made up of hard lines. The jaw was sharp and angular, the nose was like carved granite, even cheekbones were pronounced and hard. Here and there, if he looked closely enough, the boy could make out fine, white-toned scars…none of them deep, but more like blurred chalk lines on a rock. Gohan squinted and tried to imagine that face smiling. He decided that it was impossible.

Piccolo's eyes opened so suddenly that Gohan jumped. "And just what the Hell are _you_ staring at," he growled.

"N-nothing, sir!" Gohan exclaimed, backing up a little bit.

"Didn't think so," Piccolo said. He closed his eyes again, hunched over a little more, etched that scowl deeper on his face than it had been before, so that there were long shadows on his face.

Gohan wondered if he'd hurt his feelings. His mom was always telling him that it wasn't nice to stare, especially not at people who were a little bit different – in wheelchairs or something like that, because it might make them embarrassed. "I'm sorry, sir," he said.

Piccolo's only response was a faint growl.

Gohan decided that maybe he'd talked to Mr. Piccolo enough for one night. He just seemed to be making him madder. Drawing his knees up to his chest, Gohan tried to make himself comfortable. The sand was rough, and his study clothes, even without the tunic over top, weren't exactly practical…or warm. He hadn't thought that he was going to have to worry about being cold in the desert. It was, though, and every little granule was like an ice cube against his bare arms any way he sat…

That was by far the least of his worries, though…as a moment later, his stomach growled almost as loudly as Mr. Piccolo had moments before. Gohan looked up nervously to see if the other had noticed – he didn't seem to, because he didn't move.

"Um…sir?" he said.

"What," the other said.

"I'm sort of hungry. D'you know where I could get something to eat?"

Mr. Piccolo shot him a look that would best classify as ironic. "Look around," he said.

Gohan did, first over his left shoulder, then over his right. All he saw over the left was flat, bristly badland covered in spiny plants that looked like pincushions. All that he saw over the right were rising bluffs that had always looked cool in his schoolbooks, but up close just looked like piles of rock. "But sir, there's nothing out here," he said.

Mr. Piccolo smirked. "Then you better go find something," he said.

"Find something?" Gohan asked. "Like what?"

"Tch, how should I know?"

"But sir…"

"No 'but sir's'" Piccolo snapped. "If you want to eat, you're going to have to find it on your own."

Gohan's eyes widened. "On my own?"

Piccolo growled. "You can't possibly be THAT helpless." He then closed his eyes again.

Gohan swallowed any further protests…Piccolo was actually kind of like his mom in that it was easy to tell when it just wasn't safe to argue with him. "Yes, sir," he said miserably, and started walking.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Cymbal had never been lucky, Tambourine reflected as he poured himself another glass of wine. Or maybe lucky wasn't the right word, because Tambourine didn't, in the strictest sense, believe in luck. He did, however, believe in fate. Fate was different from luck in that it was traceable, logical…it followed a path. And Cymbal was one of the most ill-fated individuals he'd ever seen.

"It all comes," Tambourine told the prostrate form of his brother, which was still stretched out on the table, "of being an evil henchman."

Cymbal, who had not moved in something like three days, opened one eye slightly, but he did not seem to be awake. The cornea was milky, glazed like a frosty window.

Tambourine took a sip of his drink. "Life is really just one long, complicated novel, you see. It has its character types like any other book. And how many books have you ever read about evil henchmen?"

Predictably, Cymbal didn't answer beyond a slight movement of the lips, as if he were speaking to himself in his sleep.

"None," Tambourine said. "In most stories, you know, they simply disappear after the overlord is defeated. No one really knows what happens to them."

Again, no answer.

"You, though…you had the misfortune to live," Tambourine said. "It's not so bad for most of us. We still have a role to play…a part that may yet change. But as for you, brother…"

Tambourine turned his head slightly…enough to look at his brother straight on and assess his situation. Cymbal looked better than he had two days ago in that, at the very least, it was clear that he was alive and not dead. He was still not well. The great gashes on his body had closed, but not healed…reddish-purple lines crisscrossed over his frame, and the burns were still like shiny cellophane patches on otherwise matte skin.

"You," Tambourine repeated, "are a side character….and the best you might hope for is a side story."

Cymbal seemed to stir a little at that, but Tambourine didn't pay much mind to it. Instead, he turned his eyes to the doorway, the ghost of a smirk flickering over his features. "Ah," he said. "Here comes one now."

Tambourine's eyes arched slightly, but not in a happy way. He couldn't hear them yet – even his hearing was not so keen as that…but he knew they were there. Piano and Drum…in the stairwell…their backs to the wall as if they expected someone to come out and look for them.

"Idiots," Tambourine reflected, turning his eyes to the ceiling. "Honestly, you'd think I collected them."

Still, idiots could be dangerous when they really wanted to be, so Tambourine made a rare concession and set his wine glass down. Closing his eyes, he did something that he generally avoided because stupidity, to him, was actually painful in the same way that grammatical errors are painful to grammar-school teachers. Focusing his mind like an arrow, he shot it Piano-wards.

_The stairwell was dark…and glittered where dripping water had, here and there, frozen into veins of ice against the stone. Piano didn't like it, edging a little closer to Drum on the way up. "What if he wakes up?" he asked for the third time. _

_Drum snorted. "You saw how bad he was messed up. What's he going to do even if he does. It'll be over before he knows it." _

_"What about the bookworm?" _

_"We've been through this. He won't interfere…and he's too weak to be worth killing." _

_"Then…I guess now or never?" _

_Drum nodded, a smirk like a cut working its way across his face. He began climbing the stairs again. _

Tambourine shook his head, a little amused at being so grossly underestimated… but there would be time to smirk over that later. He turned his eyes to Cymbal. "You're going to want to wake up," he said levelly. The body on the desk stirred slightly as if in response to his words.

There was a heavy knock on the door that could have come from a hand or a battering ram. Tambourine walked over to it sedately, turning the knob, pulling back that sheet of newly-repaired, thick wood. "Yes?" he said to Drum's sneering face.

"Out of our way," the larger Namekian growled.

Tambourine raised an eyeridge at him. "You really don't want me to do that," he said.

Drum snorted. "I think I know what I want, thankyou."

Tambourine shrugged. "You know what you want, but…not what you're going to get." And then he stepped away from the door. "Not that it's really any of my business"

Drum stepped in, massive shoulders barely fitting through even _that_ doorway…smirking wickedly at the form sprawled out on the table. "Just like I told you," he said to Piano. "He'll die easy."

"Who will," Cymbal growled suddenly from the table, twisting with deceptive grace from the position that he'd originally landed in to a crouch that looked less like a fighting stance and more like the position a wild animal might take before ripping some unfortunate herbivore to shreds.

The air in the room went still. Tambourine could feel the wheels essentially jam up as Drum and Piano looked at one another, wondering whether to back out or rush, balancing on the edge of indecision for that one moment…not even a moment, a piece of one. Then Cymbal was across the room, hands fisted in the front of Drum's gi, lifting him easily off the floor and slamming his back against the wall. Leaning forward, he bared bloodstained teeth in something that wasn't quite a snarl. "Give me one reason I shouldn't rip your damned face off."

Drum's mouth opened slightly, as if he was trying to find words, but not succeeding. Cymbal didn't wait, dropping one shoulder and heaving the larger demon at Piano, who didn't catch him so much as fall backward with him against an entirely different wall.

"Get out of my sight," Cymbal growled in that low, low tone that meant business.

Piano and Drum looked at him for a moment, visibly weighing their chances.

Cymbal's eyes slitted. "Don't make me say it again," he said.

With a last, nervous look his way, Piano and Drum left the room, eyes downcast.

As soon as the sounds of their footsteps had fully receded, however, Cymbal's aggressive posture dissolved. He sank to a knee, doubling over ribs that were, no doubt, still kitting, hissing out a breath between clenched teeth. Little flecks of blood fell onto the floor.

Tambourine crossed the room in three long, slow steps. He put a hand on Cymbal's shoulder – not a heavy, reassuring palm, but a ghost of a touch, fingertips only. "Bluffing, Cymbal? It isn't like you."

The larger demon didn't answer at first, and when he did, it was in a soft, strained voice that didn't, at first, even sound like his. "What _happened_?" he asked.

"To what?" Tambourine responded as calmly as before…but with a note of sympathy in his voice.

"I tried…to hold it together," Cymbal said. "Until He came back."

By He, of course, Cymbal meant the original Daimaou no Piccolo, their father, the demon king. Tambourine nodded once. "But he didn't come back," Tambourine said.

Cymbal shook his head. "No," he said. "He said he would, but he hasn't. And then I tried to do what he would have wanted, after that, but…I'm _not_ him."

"I know," Tambourine said.

"It wasn't supposed to be this way," Cymbal said softly– and Tambourine knew he was referring to so much more than what had just happened. He was talking about their former lord's death at the hands of Son Goku, at their blind fumbling and constant failures since – he was talking about their missing brother and more, maybe, than that. He was talking about their youngest brother's loss and subsequent betrayal. He was talking about the way that everything seemed to be falling apart. Tambourine wondered how Cymbal would have felt if he'd known how much he had had to do with that – how carefully he'd pulled the strings, one by one, to unravel the knot.

"No," Tambourine said at last, almost gently. "I don't think it was.

Cymbal looked up at him – the red in his eyes was hot with grief and maybe…_ma_ybe…the rough beginnings of regret. "Where did it go wrong?" he asked hoarsely.

Tambourine shook his head. "It didn't _go_ wrong, Cymbal," he said. "It started out that way. But," and here, he forced a small, thin-lipped smile onto his face, "we're going to fix that, you and I. We're going to fix it all."

Cymbal leaned against his leg, shoulders a little rounded, head bowed.. "I don't know what to do anymore," he said.

"I do," Tambourine said in that same soft voice. "Leave it to me."

Cymbal's only response was to nod once. But that was all Tambourine really needed to see. "Sleep now," he said. "I'll take care of it."

_Though not,_ Tambourine thought as his older brother drifted off, _in the way that you're thinking of._


	3. Chapter 3

Gohan had wanted water.

He'd wanted it badly.

In the past, water had been easy. There were things in Gohan's life that had been hard, before Piccolo had taken him. Math had been hard. Sitting still inside with the sun pouring through his window like melted candy, when birds were singing somewhere, when his legs shook under his desk from wanting to run, that had been hard. But water had been easy. Just a tug on mom's apron, or, later, a push of a chair over to the sink, and holding a glass under the faucet, and water would come out, would fill the glass like a crystal.

After a day and a night outdoors, Gohan was willing to give back the stupid birds, the sun that beat down on his back, and even his legs, his tired, stupid legs that could barely hold him up. He would have traded it all in, the whole wilderness for his shady desk, his mother's apron, a glass of water from the faucet.

He hadn't bothered, that morning, to tell Piccolo that he was thirsty. Piccolo would just have told him to deal with it. So he had gone looking for water. And he'd found it. Only he didn't have a glass.

Gohan stood, perplexed, along the side of what was too big to be a stream. _A river_, he decided. He wondered if the water was safe to drink, or full of bacteria and germs and things that would make him sick. His mom had always told him not to drink anything that he didn't get from a safe source.

Then again, his mother had told him not to talk to strangers, and he was pretty sure that he wasn't supposed to get kidnapped, either. So maybe this was one of those cases where the rules just didn't apply. His dad had said that would happen sometimes.

_Well, _he thought, _I guess if I think it through – if I don't drink anything, I'm gonna die of thirst sooner or later, definitely. Or I could drink the water and maybe get sick. _

When he looked at it that way, Gohan didn't have a whole lot of choice. Holding his tail out carefully for balance, he made his way down the crumbly bank to the side of the water. Once there, he ran into another problem. "It's rude to use my hands," he said out loud. But there weren't any glasses or bowls around. The boy looked to his left, then his right, making sure that no one would see him. Then, carefully, he bent down, scooped the water into his palm, and brought it to his lips.

It didn't taste like it would make him sick. In fact, it tasted good – good and cold, and only a little bit like mud. Unable to hold off anymore, Gohan lowered himself down to his hands and knees, brought his mouth right down to the water, and drank like a deer, pulling as much of the water over his dry tongue as he could.

It was wonderful for ten seconds. Then the water blew up in his face.

Gohan screamed and scrambled back at the same time, faster than he thought he could move as the crocodile broke water right in front of him, its jaws snapping shut just inches from Gohan's feet. It fell to the bank in front of him, mouth opening again, soft pink folds inside that swelled and shrank with every breath.

The boy tried to roll over and run, but he saw the eye first. The big yellow eye the size of both his fists put together, glassy like a fish eye, fixed right on him. Gohan's blood froze, his body froze – he couldn't do anything but stare, just the exact way that a bird will stare at a snake.

The mouth came for him again. This time, Gohan wasn't fast enough. He curled into a ball, made a helpless sound as he somehow missed the teeth, pulled into the thing's mouth, so hot, dark, push around him, it was going to _swallow…_

The world rocked sideways shook, split open like an egg as light slammed into Gohan's eyes, as something yanked his collar hard enough to hurt, and then he was on the ground, thrown on the ground with a heavy motion like a slap, his arms shaking so hard he almost couldn't hold himself up, covered all over in goop. Gohan coughed, and shook, and stared at the ground, clenching his hands in the dirt and unclenching them, proving that it was real…

The world boomed around him: "WHAT in the HELL is WRONG with you?!"

It was Piccolo's voice – a yelling, angry Piccolo. When Gohan turned his head a little, he could see his feet planted on the desert floor like a pair of trees. "Do you WANT to die? Is that it?! What IS it with you monkeys, some kind of weird genetic tendency?"

Gohan couldn't really filter out what he was saying. Just that he was yelling still, that he was angry, that his voice was making him cringe, press himself even closer to the ground. Piccolo was in a really, REALLY bad mood, and doing anything to make him madder would've been a REALLY bad idea. But right then, Gohan didn't care. With a small cry he barely recognized as his own – it sounded like something a kitten would make – he threw himself forward and wrapped himself around Piccolo's shin, clinging to it with all the strength in his small body. And as soon as he started breathing again, he buried his face in the hot, rough fabric of the other's gi, and he started to cry. He cried so hard he shook from head to foot.

Piccolo went completely silent, and stiff – stiff like a marble statue Gohan had sat against once in town. He didn't bend down, put his hand on his shoulder like Gohan's dad would have done; he didn't pick him up and hold him close to his chest like his mom would have done. He just stood there.

Piccolo wasn't much of a dad or a mom, wasn't anything like Gohan had read that a friend should be like. But he was all Gohan had. So he'd just have to do.

* * *

Piccolo stared down at the child-sized growth on his leg in disbelief, so shocked he couldn't even manage to work his mouth around words. Which was a shame. Because he had a really impressive mental backlog of profanity that, with some creative mix and match work on his part, might help him to express JUST how much he didn't want to be used as a crying towel OR a teddy bear.

He thought about kicking the brat off. But given what a mess his aura in right now, he'd probably kick the little moron too hard and splat him against the rocks like an egg. Besides – Piccolo winced as he was struck with a mental visual of himself hopping around on one leg, attempting to dislodge an increasingly-determined child from his foot – that wasn't exactly the most dignified scenario he could come up with.

Piccolo huffed, crossed his arms, and glared down at the boy, hoping he'd take the hint. But he didn't. He didn't even look up. The kid was in hysterics, sobbing so hard it was a wonder he didn't heave out a lung.

Irritably, "Kid, for Kami's sake, take a breath."

If anything, Gohan clung tighter.

"You're _not_ hurt," the Namek said. He gave his leg a slight shake. "Get up."

Gohan still didn't let go. But he seemed to be making an effort to control himself, hiccoughing, still shaking, still holding onto him as if he were a lifeboat in a wild sea.

Piccolo didn't know what to do.

"I dun…dun…dun…want…to die," the boy stammered out.

"Well, good," Piccolo said, rolling his eyes toward the sky. "You're not dead. Yet," he added sharply, giving his leg another meaningful shake.

"I…I…thought…I…was," Gohan gasped into the fabric of Piccolo's gi.

Piccolo very nearly snapped at him again. But…what good would it do? The kid was barely even hearing him, huddled against his shin, saliva all over him like egg white on a recently-hatched bird. Only Piccolo, on the day of his hatching, had been more able to take care of himself than this soft little monkey was.

_Good gods, do they ALL start out this way? _He wondered. Then, _Did Son? _

That couldn't be right. According to his father's memories, Son Goku had been a fighter by this age…had been more than a damn handful at twelve. But in this boy, Piccolo had seen no trace of a fighter, no chi flickers, nothing to indicate that he was a fighter at all.

Maybe it was the human influence. Maybe the boy really just was too soft, too young, too weak…whatever.

Maybe nothing he could do would make this boy any more able to take care of himself against schoolyard bullies, much less a hardened warrior like Cymbal.

Piccolo very nearly picked the boy up by the scruff of his neck then and there and hauled him right back to that soft little yard he had come from. He very nearly dropped him in a sticky, sobbing puddle at his mother's feet and washed his hands of it. But no. Something was holding him back.

Closing his eyes, Piccolo allowed himself to drift just a little – into that narrowly-defined world that is almost meditation, but not quite, not all the way. Piccolo, in one life or another, had killed children this age with less thought than he'd abandon this one. There had to be a reason.

He found it. It wasn't a good reason. It was only a memory, fuzzy around the edges from where he'd tried to forget it. He had been very young then, and a storm had come, hurling water and lightning down from the sky like weapons. He'd found a place to hide and huddled there, an overhang between two rocks. He had found something solid, and he'd clung to it with all of his young will to survive, had hid his face against the rock.

That was when he had known what it meant to be afraid, and not just tired.

The former demon reached down with one hand and grabbed the boy by the back part of the shirt. Gohan dangled from his fingers like a kitten, tears streaking down his face still, pink and puffy as any newborn. Piccolo tried not to let himself sneer _too_ much. "Let's get you cleaned up," he said roughly.

Gohan nodded his head and smiled in a way that was a thankyou.

* * *

"And you're sure this will work," Cymbal said.

Tambourine shot him an irate look from the window. "I never do anything," he said, "without being sure."

Cymbal nodded once, and then looked down at his hands. He had been sitting at the table for most of the morning. He was strong enough to stand, walk around, but still he had no energy. The thought of stepping out of that room seemed too monumental an effort to make; the thought of fighting again so soon made him ache all the way down into the bones. Cymbal had been tired before. He'd been in fights that had lasted for hours, waged campaigns that had stretched on for days. He'd used every ounce of energy he had before – used it up until just drive kept him on his feet and his vision swam brown. But this was different. This wasn't tiredness. This was weariness. Heavy, cotton-textures weariness. And demons were not supposed to get _weary._

He didn't know what to blame it on. Perhaps the last battle had just been that draining, perhaps it was the strain of stumbling on in the dark – but it felt as if something had been sucked out of him with a straw, leaving him exhausted.

Cymbal thanked any gods who were listening that Tambourine had been willing to step up, had essentially taken the reigns out of his hands. Cymbal would have fought that once, would have mistrusted his motives, but things had changed, somehow, over the past few days. He still did not, in the strictest sense, like his brother. There had been too many bad years. The difference was that if someone so much as moved against his brother, Cymbal would rip out the someone's throat with his bare hands. And he would make it last a long time.

He wanted to think about that dynamic, sometimes…but it seemed a foolish thing to sort through when so many other things were demanding his attention. The most important of these was that he wasn't sure he had the strength to do what Tambourine had asked him to do.

"And once I kill the boy," Cymbal said.

"Once you kill the boy, you will bring Piccolo back here."

Cymbal closed his eyes for a moment. "That'll be a real picnic," he said sourly. He didn't have to reach far back into his memory to remember talons sinking into his skin, bones fracturing under the force of a kick.

The demon flinched slightly when he felt Tambourine's hand on his shoulder – so light, like a spring rain. "It _will_ be hard," Tambourine said softly. "But our Lord's memories are in him…perhaps his soul as well. Once you've broken all the ties that he has to this life he's chosen…" Tambourine's voice dropped slightly, almost a whisper, "one you've wiped the slate clean, I will be able to piece together the things that fell apart during his youth."

Cymbal swallowed, "And?"

Almost gently, "Cymbal – I've told you already."

"_I _want to be sure, Tambourine. That I understand." Then, a little heavily, "We can't all see things like you can."

The silver eyes arched slightly. "I might be able to put him back together, Cymbal. And he can return, just as he promised…just as he always meant to do." Tambourine shook his head slightly, a wry smirk playing across his features. "He never thought much of me, Cymbal. But he would _not_ have left you…or this precious, sad little world of his… like this. You have to know that this was what he wanted."

"Why would you do this," he asked.

Tambourine offered him a small, tight-lipped smile. "We all have our own duties, Cymbal. Even when they aren't pleasant." The fingers on his shoulder tightened ever-so-slightly. "Even when it isn't what _we_ want."

That was something that Cymbal understood – that he had always understood. He nodded once. But he didn't get up yet. Something was tickling the back of his head. Something important and small, like a thorn, needling him. He was having a hard time figuring out what it was…every time he thought he had it, it slipped away, something about souls and bodies…something about what-if…

Cymbal almost gave up on it. But he stretched just a little harder, and there it was, clear in front of him like a hand emerging from the water. "What about…" his mouth was having a hard time forming words – he couldn't hear them anyway over the sudden pounding in his head, the sudden thrum of blood in his ears. "The brat. What happens to _him_?"

Tambourine shook his head. "We've been through this once, Cymbal. You will kill him. It's necessary."

"No, damnit, not the monkey-spawn." Pause. "Piccolo."

Tambourine withdrew his hand as if reluctant to break contact – his fingers trailed off Cymbal's shoulder like falling leaves. After a moment, he averted his eyes. His voice, when it came out, was slow. "To achieve any end, sacrifices must be made," he said. "It's regrettable. But this is the purpose that he was meant to serve. And no one can argue with that."

The room was silent for a long time.

Finally, Cymbal spoke. "I understand," he said. The pounding in his head stopped. It left him feeling empty, weirdly empty. Something had passed through him, had scooped out all of the heavy things that had been pounding inside him just seconds ago. But he didn't feel any lighter.

For maybe the first time in his life, Cymbal felt no desire to fight. There was no excitement, no anger, no eagerness. None of that pulse-pounding hyper-alertness that he'd gotten used to, come to rely on almost as a drug. He felt none of that at all; nothing, in fact, just the tired sense of a task, the strange emptiness, and the bizarre desire to curl right back up on the table he'd finally crawled off of, close his eyes, and wait for it all to go away.

Except that was stupid, because it would _never_ go away. Not unless he made it.

He wasn't sure that he was strong enough. But he would have to be anyway. There was no one else to do it.

"You should rest now," Tambourine said. "You're still not yourself. And you will need to be at your best for this."

"Yeah…I guess so." Cymbal lay his forehead down across his crossed arms, willing himself to doze. He'd never slept so much in his life – and never had it helped so little.

* * *

Snake Way, Son Goku thought as he stared down the endless, twisting path, was probably not as bad as it looked. Because that would be completely impossible. NOTHING could be as bad as snake way looked.

The road was, to all appearances, a snake – winding away from him like a crack in the sky.

"Man," he said, standing at the very head of what might very well be the longest road in the universe. "Kami, I'm not so sure we have time for this."

Kami bowed his head slightly. "It's only a year, Goku," he said.

"Yeah, but from what I've heard, no one else even _knows_ about this…"

"All the more reason to go now…quickly. You'll be of more use when you're stronger."

Goku nodded. He knew already that if they didn't have time, maybe, for the trip in the first place, then they definitely didn't have any time to argue about it. He hopped up on the road…and he began to run, feeling each step through the balls of his feet, enjoying the feel of his body settling into rhythm. The problem with running was that it was so mechanical – so brainless – that he had a lot of time to think.

Time to wonder just what had happened. What was still happening on Earth. Without him.

The last few days hadn't exactly been reassuring. Chichi, when he had left her with Gohan, had been sitting in a chair at the kitchen table, finally upright after her encounter with Cymbal. She had been acting strong – seemed strong, even, in the way that a bamboo tree can sometimes seem strong – but her hands had been shaking so hard her cup of tea had rattled on its saucer.

Then there had been Gohan, sleeping fitfully in a blanket, huddled in Chichi's lap. Goku's heart ached just thinking of all the things that his son had been through over the past few days…and the danger wasn't past, not even close, not with people like Cymbal around, not with more Saiyans on the way. Every instinct he had screamed against running farther from his son right now. Even though there was no way he could help him any more from the check-in station than he could from Snake Way.

He was leaving his family unprotected when they needed him. And there was no getting past that. His family, his friends – he didn't even know if Krillen was okay, or if he was still out there in the rain, barely hanging on...

And then there was Piccolo. Unbidden, an image came to Goku's mind, bleary and full of rain – Piccolo, nose to nose with him, giving him a rough shake after he had fallen.

_"No,"_ he had said with a fierceness that Son Goku had rarely heard from him. _"You don't get to do this to me, asshole. You don't get to drag me all over the free world, ruin my damn life, and then up and DIE on me."_

Goku had been too dazed to really understand at the time…or at least, to understand beyond the fact that Piccolo had been worried about him and was trying –without a lot of success– to cover it. But it was more than that. Much more.

Piccolo was changing. It was a slow change, it was stubborn; it was something that Piccolo probably understood even less than Goku did. And even Goku could see that it was scaring the Hell out of him. Then, right when it mattered most, right _after_ Piccolo had taken on his own brother to help him…he'd left him to deal with the repercussions on his own.

It wasn't supposed to happen that way. Goku would've known that even if King Yamma hadn't mentioned that he wasn't supposed to be dead yet. It just wasn't right.

And yet, it had happened.

He wished that he could talk to them, all of them. Tell Chichi that he'd be home soon, tell Gohan to be strong, to hold on. Tell Krillen that he'd done well, he was proud of him, to hold the fort for just a little while. Tell Cymbal that if he set foot near his family again, he'd make him wish he'd died. Tell Piccolo…

Son Goku had no idea what he'd tell Piccolo. What could he possibly say, other than, "I'm sorry?" And _that _would probably just make him mad.

It was all a moot point, anyway. Because Son Goku couldn't talk to them. He couldn't send a message, couldn't even wave goodbye. There was no point brooding about it.

There was nothing to do about it but run.


	4. Chapter 4

Gohan was beginning to realize that he and Piccolo did not speak the same language. Take the words "cleaned up," for example. When Gohan's mom said, "Let's get you cleaned up," she meant that they were going to go out back together and heat up some water in an oil drum. His mom would pile wood that his father had cut, and then she would light it with a strike of a match, shake her wrist once to put it out. Meantime, Gohan would get undressed, fold his clothes, and climb into the barrel. There would be soap and washcloths, freshly –dried towels, the smell of laundry on the line, each sheet and shirt waving like a handkerchief from the side of a boat.

When Piccolo said that Gohan needed to "get cleaned up" he meant that he would fly to the nearest small, freezing mountain stream, stick out his arm, and drop Gohan squarely into the deepest eddy he could find without a word of warning

"GAH!" Gohan cried, clawing his way to the surface. His arms wrapped around himself reflexively, and his whole body burned at once, contracting with cold. "M…Mr. Piccolo! What'd you d..do that for?"

Piccolo crossed his arms, standing dry and calm on the bank. "I felt like it," he said. "Now rinse off."

"B…but it's c..cold!" Gohan gasped out, thinking perhaps that Piccolo had not understood that part of the problem.

The larger warrior was unmoved. "The sooner you get done, the sooner you can get out," he said levelly.

Arguing with Piccolo usually went about that way. Gohan sighed. "Yes sir," he said miserably. Then he began sliding handfuls of the frigid water up and down his arms, trying to flush away the gluey saliva from his skin.

Crocodile spit, he realized, doesn't necessarily dissolve in water. Which makes sense as crocodiles spend a lot of time being wet. Still, it was pretty disappointing, and exactly the kind of thing that Gohan wished that his stupid science books had mentioned. It was beginning to occur to him that his books never told him anything useful.

"_Will_ you hurry it up," Piccolo growled after a few seconds of this. "I got better things to do than watch you turn purple."

Gohan reminded himself that sniffling did not help with Piccolo. "I'm trying, sir," he said. He scrubbed harder, noticing that his fingers were less white and more blue.

"Oh, for…" Piccolo waded into the stream with long, angry-looking steps, not even flinching at the way the water must've felt. He grabbed Gohan's collar roughly from behind and dunked him once, hauled him back up, and began working the stuff out of his hair. "Can't you do anything for yourself?"

Gohan winced as those long talons worked their way through his hair in the same way that one might handle a tangled rope. "N…not really," he said.

"Well, it's for damn sure time you learned," Piccolo growled, dunking him again. Gohan had an interesting and unpleasant image of the big fighter scrubbing him up and down a washboard like a worn-out pair of socks. "You think your mamma's gonna follow you around your whole life with a box of tissues and a bagged lunch?"

"B…but Mr. Piccolo…"

"For the gods' sakes, stop calling me Mr. Piccolo."

Gohan swallowed. "Sir, m'only five and a half…m'just a little kid! Your parents are supposed to take care of you when you're little. Then, when you grow up, you get to do things on your own…like stay up late, and…and whatever else grownups do."

"Well then, brat," Piccolo said. "I'd say it's time to grow up." He picked him up again and tossed him unceremoniously on the bank.

Gohan landed on his butt like a sack of potatoes. He curled into a ball as the wind hit him, drawing his knees up all the way to his chest. "S'easy for you to say, sir. You're _already _big."

Piccolo snorted. "Are you making cracks about my weight now?"

Gohan's eyes widened. He knew from living with his mom that this could be a very bad idea. "N..no sir! I meant tall! And…um…really, really tall!"

It was only when he saw the slightly sour look on Piccolo's face that he wondered if the big warrior had actually been joking. It was hard to tell with him.

"I wasn't always big," Piccolo said.

Gohan bit his lip before he could say that he couldn't picture Piccolo as being anything other than big and scary and scowling.

"But I learned to take care of myself anyway," Piccolo said. The large warrior cracked the knuckles of one hand, then the knuckles on the other...all blending into popcorn-esque crackle. "Just like you're about to do."

_Uh oh, _Gohan thought. He crabwalked backward a little bit. "What do you mean, like I'm about to?"

Piccolo grinned in a very unsettling way. "Get up," he said.

Gohan's legs obeyed before his head could process that this was probably not going to be a lot of fun.

"Now," Piccolo said, lowering himself into what Gohan could sort of recognize as a fighting stance. "It's about time you learned how to fight."

Gohan sucked in a deep, fast breath. "F..fight?"

"Mmhmm. I suggest you get your guard up."

"But I don't even know the first thing about…"

Piccolo inclined his head slightly forward – and Gohan could see the planes of his face hardening into something he might have seen in a nightmare once. "You'll have point two seconds to figure it out." He drew a massive fist back, settling it right up against his chin. Gohan tried not to think about how much it would hurt to be hit with a hand like that. "Better use them wisely."

Gohan tried to answer, but it was too late. Piccolo left the ground and shot at him like a rocket. He had never imagined that anything could move that fast – first, ten feet away, then on him so soon his brain froze up.

He didn't even move when the foot came at him, beyond curling his stomach in away from it. It didn't really help at all. His feet left the ground in a jackknife position, his air left him all in a houff, and then he was on the ground, surely several yards away, and he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Piccolo was still right on him.

The boy doubled over, making himself as small a ball as possible, and closed his eyes. But the expected blow never came.

Instead, Gohan opened his eyes slowly and peered up, squinting against the brightness of the sun. Piccolo was standing over him with a look of outright disbelief stamped on his face.

"S…sir?" he stammered.

"What the Hell are you doing?" Piccolo growled.

Gohan sat up. "Covering up. I thought you were gonna hit me, and…"

Piccolo slapped a hand over his face. "Dear gods," he said, pronouncing each word very separately. "How does your species _survive_ long enough to reproduce?"

"My science book says it's the advent of technology," Gohan supplied miserably, hunching over his knees. "It says that made up for all kinds of evolutionary deficiencies."

The big warrior gave him an odd look. "Excuse me?" he said.

"Well, humans are at an evolutionary disadvantage to most species because we don't have fangs and claws and stuff, so we were pretty low on the food chain until we started using tools – y'know, like chimps and gorillas do? And then we just kept getting more advanced. The book called it an 'equalizer,' so I guess it means that…"

"Oh for the love of…SHUT IT already," Piccolo practically roared. The sound of his voice was so angry that Gohan jumped. "It was a RHETORICAL question. You know what 'rhetorical' is?"

Eyes wide, Gohan nodded.

Seeing this, Piccolo seemed to calm down. He took several breaths so deep that his shoulders raised and fell, cracked his neck sharply to one side, and finished with a long, slow exhale. "Okay," Piccolo said. "Alright. You've got the fighting instincts of an anemic slug. But you like to overthink things. Maybe we can work with this."

Gohan kept quiet. He kind of had the feeling that Piccolo was having this conversation mostly with himself, and he probably didn't want interruptions.

"What we're going to do," Piccolo said finally, "is we're going to program some reactions into you." The green fighter's eyes narrowed slightly. "Some **useful** reactions," he amended after a second or two.

"How're we gonna do that, sir?" Gohan asked warily.

"Method," Piccolo growled. "Get into a stance."

"But I don't know any…" Gohan saw the look on Piccolo's face and thought better of whining. He stood up, dusted off his knees, and tried to mirror what Piccolo had been doing earlier.

"More weight on the back foot," Piccolo growled.

Gohan nodded for what felt like the hundredth time that day and shifted his weight back.

"Now on the balls of your feet. And for the gods' sakes get your hands up."

Gohan had never had anyone talk to him like that. But he shifted his weight a little, brought his hands up to chest level.

The former demon looked Gohan over with his hard eyes – and snorted. "Not terrible," he said gruffly. "Now watch." Piccolo also moved into a fighting stance, though it was not quite like the one he'd done earlier – a little less bend in the knees, a little more sideways.

"Let's say you decide to kick me," he said.

Gohan stood still, eyes wide.

Piccolo visibly counted to ten. "That means kick me," he said.

Gohan did not like that idea. "But…sir…I don't want to kick you."

"…why the Hell not."

"Well…you haven't really done anything to me. And Mom says I should never, ever fight unless I _absolutely_ have to, and even then, I should try running away first."

Piccolo's eyes narrowed. "If you don't try to kick me," he said, "I promise I _will _make it necessary."

"Oh," Gohan said. He wondered, not for the first time this week, if he was trapped in some kind of strange nightmare. "But sir…if I kick you, won't you get mad anyway?"

"NOT as mad as I'll get if you don't. Now do as you're told before I decide to go back to my FIRST idea."

Well, when Piccolo was right, he was right. Timidly, Gohan picked up his foot and kicked; it was, at best, a sloppy attempt at something he'd seen his father do once, but Piccolo didn't complain. Instead, he brought his front foot to his back foot and executed a one-quarter turn so that Gohan's foot missed him completely.

Gohan blinked. Thought about it. Grinned. "That's pretty cool," he said. "You didn't get hit at all."

"It's all action/reaction," Piccolo said. "Nothing complicated. Now you do it."

"You're going to try to kick me?"

"Mmhmm. Slow the first time."

"Okay," Gohan said. And as soon as he finished the word, he realized that he wasn't looking at Piccolo anymore. He was looking at the sky, his knees pulled up against his body, and his stomach really, really hurt.

Piccolo's face appeared in his vision from about seven feet up – he was standing over him as one might stand over something unfortunate on one's front lawn. "What in the Hell was _that_?" he snapped. "Why didn't you move?"

"M..move?" Gohan gasped out in a weezy voice – his lungs didn't seem to want to open up.

"YES, brat. Move. When I kicked you. That was the whole point of the exercise."

"B..but sir, I d..didn't even s..see you!" Gohan gasped, trying to roll over onto his side. His stomach felt like it had a knot tied in it.

Piccolo slapped a hand over his eyes and slowly dragged it down his face. "Kid," he said, and to Gohan his voice sounded very tired, "we have a LOT of work to do."

Gohan decided then and there that, if he managed to get home, he was NEVER gonna complain about being cooped up in his room to study again. Ever.

* * *

"Now let's see," Krillen said, upending his sack and letting the next sphere roll out, its sides marked with three round-edged stars. "With this one, the one from Gohan's old hat, and the one under the pillow, we have…"

"Three," Bulma supplied glumly. She leaned back in her chair and sighed, running a hand through her newly-cropped hair. She was dressed simply – khaki shorts, navy-colored Capsule Corp t-shirt, a heavy belt for holding various pouches and tools. Krillen wondered how she still managed to look like she was posing for some designer's "rugged casual" line. Bulma always looked like a model, even when the world was ending. He wondered if she did it on purpose, or if she just didn't notice.

"Yeah," he said. "I'd kinda hoped we'd have more of 'em by now. What's the dragon radar got to say?"

Bulma pulled a large, watchlike-device from her hip, pushing a button in a way that made it beep. "It says we're done with the easy ones, "she said after a moment.

"No offense, Bulma," Krillen said. "But I don't think we're defining 'easy' the same way."

Bulma shot him an especially look over the top of the radar. "Well, you just look at where the next one is, then," she said, thrusting the radar at him so fast he was surprised she didn't smash it right into his nose.

Krillen's eyes crossed briefly, trying to read the bright green screen – then he leaned back some, which helped. "Wow," he said. "The rest are so far away."

"And that's not all," Bulma said. She pointed to a little orange dot on the screen. "Do you know where that is?"

Krillen peered at the blip, nestled right in a bunch of triangles that he guessed were mountains. "China?" he asked.

"Mmmhmm…look closer."

Krillen squinted at the screen, imagined himself flying in that direction… "Aw, man," he said quietly. "Castle psycho."

"Crawling with all kinds of crazed demons by now, no doubt," Bulma said, rubbing the bridge of her nose. "I really don't know how we're going to get in there at all, much less sneak out with a dragonball."

"Well, we can't do it on our own, that's for sure," Krillen said. "I've never even BEEN in that place; I wouldn't know how to start, where to get in, what to do…"

"Someone has to know something," Bulma said. "Who do we know who HAS been in there?"

Krillen looked down at his hands. "Well," he said reluctantly. "I know _**someone**_. But he's gonna be real hard to find."

"That's better than going into a fortress like that blind," Bulma said. "You're just going to have to find him."

"That's easy for you to say," Krillen said, aware that he sounded more miserable than he had at any other point in his life. Because there was no way that Piccolo was going to be glad to see him. Not at all.

He wondered morbidly if his insurance covered death by rampaging maniac, and decided it'd be just his luck if it didn't. But then, all his policies were probably null and void anyway, given that he'd already died once.

And he decided that if they DID manage to wish Goku back, the very first thing he was doing was going to be to kick him in the shin REALLY hard.

Lightyears and dimensions away, someone sneezed.


	5. Chapter 5

Piccolo liked to consider himself a pretty experienced guy. He wasn't very old, per say, but he'd been through a lot. He'd seen more battles in the few years of his life than most humans could manage to see in generations. But there were other facts that he just didn't know. And he was in the process of learning one of them. That truth was this: living with a kid is not easy.

Kids do stupid things.

Like invite you to birthday parties, and sleep with their heads on your leg, and tug on your cape and try to hand you a flower. "My mom likes them," kids will explain, staring up at you with wide, soap-bubble eyes. "They always cheer her up when she's upset. And Mr. Piccolo, you look really, really upset. Sir."

"I am NOT upset," you can growl at them, if you feel like it. "At least, I wasn't before you stopped your pushups to go looking for colorful weeds. Now get back to work."

"Yes sir," a kid will say. And visibly try not to cry. And then forget about it five minutes later and ask if you want to come pick berries with him.

Or maybe not kids in general. Maybe just Son Gohan.

The kid was weird. Piccolo expected that. But he was weird in a completely different way from Son Goku, and Piccolo had _not_ expected that.

The boy was not a complete wash-out when it came to fighting, like Piccolo had initially feared. He was a smart kid, and he was learning, albeit slowly. And every once in a while, Piccolo caught a glimpse of genuine potential. A jump, ridiculously high – several stories worth of straight-up. Or a dodge, faster than anyone should be able to move, an energy blast out of nowhere. And Piccolo suspected that was just the tip of the iceberg.

Sometimes, when he pushed the kid extra hard, he'd catch a glimpse of something deeper – like when he sometimes watches great, predatory cats as kittens, barely balls of fluff with big green eyes. They're harmless-looking and soft, easily crushed with heels or hands…but when they're playing, sometimes, one will flex a paw or arch its back, and you can see the danger underneath, the promise of deadly, latent instinct. Sometimes, when Piccolo caught glimpses of it, he caught himself pulling back, wondering what would happen if he ever DID bring it out. Whether the kid would inadvertently blow like a spiky-haired volcano, and whether he'd live to tell about it.

Gohan seemed to sense it, too. When they were training, and the boy would get so close to reaching it, he would freeze up and cover his eyes with his hands. He'd balk like a mule approaching the side of a cliff, having caught sight of the great drop ahead and refusing to go further. He could feel it inside himself, and Piccolo knew without asking that he was afraid of it.

Piccolo didn't know what to tell him about overcoming fear. All of his speeches on that topic ran less than true, sounded canned to him. He knew that, in order to reach that power, Gohan would have to be more afraid of an outcome than he was of what was inside of him. He would have to want to reach it, or need to. And for all of Piccolo's pragmatics, he just could not bring himself to do what he knew he might have to.

He could not put the boy in such a life or death situation that he would HAVE to use that power.

He couldn't do it first of all because it might not work. Once or twice, he had simulated a life-or-death situation. He'd flown up several miles one day, held the kid out, and dropped him. But that hadn't worked, and Piccolo had been forced to catch him.

More worrisome was the reason WHY it wouldn't work.

Piccolo could remember that scene vividly – the one where he'd caught Gohan, not more than a meter or two from the ground. "What the Hell's the matter with you," he growled at the boy, who had clenched both hands into his gi and huddled there.

"I…I'm sorry, Mr. Piccolo."

"What was your plan, idiot? See if you can land on your ass instead of your head?"

A sniffle. "I wasn't going to die," he mumbled, half in apology, half in explanation. "I knew you'd catch me. I knew it."

Piccolo had started to growl out that he would do NOTHING of the damn sort. Only he _had _caught him, after all. Children, he'd decided then, were the most vexing creatures on earth. "I won't catch you next time," he said sourly.

But they had both known that he was probably lying.

So Gohan's faith in him, whether it was misplaced or not, was a problem. It didn't matter whether Piccolo intended to bail him out of whatever situation he created or not, Gohan adamantly believed that he'd be saved at the last second. Which prevented the absolute, crushing panic that would probably be required to get him to find that buried power of his.

The second problem was that Piccolo just didn't trust his intuition as much as he used to. He might misjudge the situation, might not read it right, and then the boy would be dead.

And why in the Hell didn't he want the boy to be dead?

Sometimes, he did. Sometimes, when Gohan would wake him up in the middle of the night with his nightmares, or when he would blunder a combination when he knew better, or when he would just keep chattering about nonsense, Piccolo legitimately thought about blowing his black-tousled little head right off his shoulders.

But there were other times, too.

Like the night before. It had been raining hard enough that Piccolo abandoned his usual open-air sleep for a small cave in the side of a mesa. Quarters had been close, especially with the small fire near the mouth, so he'd found himself sitting lotus-style, Gohan unaccountably close to his side.

The boy had done his best to stay quiet, but as usual, he was not very good at it. He shifted and fidgeted and bit his lip.

"Spit it out," Piccolo had said, keeping his eyes closed. With children as with attack dogs, it was best not to make eye contact.

He'd felt small fingers on his hand, poking at it curiously. His palm twitched, reflexively, and he reminded himself that chi blasts in enclosed spaces usually ended badly.

"It's just…your hand, sir," Gohan had said.

Against his better judgment, Piccolo uncoiled his hand, let the boy pull it into his own lap to study it more closely. It might, he figured, do the kid some good – let him see what he was up against, eventually.

Gohan turned the hand over curiously in his own small ones. He brushed his fingers over the calloused palm, poked the soft pad of his finger over a talon, his eyes widening a little at the sharpness of it. He felt the strong curve of a thumb meant for gouging things, more used to being used as a hook than as an opposable. Piccolo smirked to himself. _That's right, kid, _he thought. _My kind is built for fighting. And if you plan to live, you'd better be ready for that. _

But Gohan didn't comment on the deadliness of it. Instead, he said, "You've only got four fingers."

Piccolo blinked. "And?" he said.

"I've got five," Gohan said. "See?"

"What's that got to do with anything?"

Gohan grinned. "I dunno, sir – I was just noticing, that's all."

"Hmph."

"It _is_ kinda cool, though," he said.

Piccolo raised an eyeridge. "Cool," he said flatly.

"You know," Gohan said, letting him have his hand back. "Neat."

Piccolo looked down at his hand. "It's an appendage," he said. "It does what it needs to do. I don't see what's so interesting about that."

Gohan laughed. "Sir," he said, "Don't take this the wrong way. But you're funny, sometimes"

Piccolo felt almost offended. "I am not," he said.

Gohan didn't argue. Instead, he leaned against his side, which Piccolo usually discouraged, but Hell, there wasn't a lot of room in there. "Well, not really funny," Gohan admitted. "But you're not as scary as everybody says, either."

Piccolo huffed. "That's because you haven't made me mad enough yet," he said, attempting to hint very strongly with his voice that Gohan was pushing the envelope at that very moment.

Gohan yawned. "If I do, will you let me know?"

"If you do, kid – you'll know."

"I think it might be kinda neat to see," he said. "As long as you weren't mad at me, that is."

Piccolo smirked in spite of himself. "I have no one else to be mad at."

"Do you think you can be mad at my dad when he comes back?" And Gohan looked up at him, his eyes visible in the firelight, wide and hopeful and a little scared. And Piccolo could see what he was really asking. It was more like _my dad will come back, won't he? _

Piccolo thought about that. Closed his eyes again, and really thought about it…Son Goku holding this child in his arms like a dishrag, Son Goku blazing all around with blue-white light in the tournament ring. The blurry image of Son kneeling over him during that time he'd been so close to death, the weird, heart-clenching sense of helplessness that slowly melted into confusion. The way it had shaken up the nice, neat boundaries of his life and plunged him headlong into disaster.

And for the first time, he'd let himself live through the end of it. The way that the other smiled up at him from where they were collapsed together, torn halfway to pieces and covered in mud. How he'd finally _understood_ that too-damn-soft expression, and some of what was in it – acceptance, for the first time in his life, and a whole host of other things he'd never asked for or wanted. And how, that quickly, the life had gone out of Son Goku, and Piccolo was going to have to walk the path he'd chosen by himself alone. Again. And worse this time, because he remembered different.

He'd opened his eyes. "Gohan," he'd said. "I promise you. If your father comes back, I will be _plenty_ mad at him."

Gohan smiled. "Glad I'm not him," he said.

_I'm glad, too, _Piccolo had thought, but not said.

He'd spent most of the night trying not to think about why.

And now it was morning. He hadn't slept. And he didn't feel like sleeping.

Gohan, of course, was still out cold. Worse yet, the little brat had managed to entangle himself in Piccolo's cape. The former demon briefly considered either yanking his cape out from under the boy, or launching the boy out of the cave like a shotput. He decided on neither option. Instead, he shrugged out of his shoulderpads and set his turban aside, even pausing to lay the equipment down so that Gohan would not hear it and wake up. Then, with a care he didn't normally possess, he climbed to his feet and left that cave.

The morning smelled like rain, and he had a lot of thinking to do.

* * *

Gohan woke up to the feeling of sunlight on his eyelids. Which was a pretty welcome change to waking up with Piccolo's boot prodding his side or, on bad mornings, to waking up face-first in a pond. He wondered what had prompted his teacher's sudden change of heart, and decided he'd ask him a lot later, when he was done sleeping and he'd had breakfast.

Gohan sat up slowly and looked around. There was no sign of Piccolo, except for his cape, which Gohan had apparently wrapped himself up in. The boy grinned to himself. He knew that Piccolo must have left it at least in part so that he could sleep in a little.

Well, no sense in looking a gift horse in the mouth. Gohan settled back under the hem of his teacher's cloak, and inhaled the faint scent of pine and something else that always seemed to cling to him. He was glad he'd been wrong about the large fighter.

When Gohan had first come to the wilderness, he'd thought that Piccolo was just a big jerk who yelled a lot, and it was no wonder he didn't have any friends. But gradually, he was coming to realize that just wasn't true. At least, it wasn't true that he was just a big jerk. He really DID yell a lot. But mostly, Gohan thought, that was just because he wasn't real used to dealing with people. He didn't mean most of the things he yelled, or most of the mean things he said. He just said them.

You'd never guess it at first - because Piccolo was so, well, scary – but deep down, under all the scowling and the pointy teeth, Piccolo really wasn't a bad man. He was sad, instead; sad, and lonely, and maybe even scared, but mostly sad, and mostly tired. He was good at listening (if you didn't bring up birthday parties). And Piccolo took care of him. He felt safe when the big warrior was around – safer than he'd felt in a very long time. Because Piccolo was a great fighter, and strong, and smart, and he would not let anything happen to him.

Gohan wondered where Mr. Piccolo had taken off to. He decided he'd go see. He sat up, stretched, and thought better of it. No, he was going to go outside, and he was going to start doing his forms. That way, when Mr. Piccolo came back, he'd be happier. And maybe he wouldn't get that weird look on his face he got sometimes, like he didn't know where he was.

Decision made, Gohan walked out of the cave.

It was a beautiful day. Gohan stopped for a minute, just to admire it. The night's rain had left the air fresh, with thousands of little water-beads dangling off various blades of grass. It was like the world had just been made.

Mr. Piccolo would roll his eyes if Gohan told him that. Gohan giggled a little bit as he imagined the sour look that would come onto his face – and then he would look up, as if wondering why the heavens were tormenting him with such a waste of time.

Oh well. Maybe he'd tell him anyway, if he remembered to later. In the meantime, Gohan looked for a flat piece of ground. He took a deep breath, slid his feet out to shoulder width, and waited a few seconds to make sure his balance was right. Then, slowly, he sank in the knees, rocked his weight over his right leg, turned to face the left. He narrowed his eyes in concentration, and tried to remember whether or not it was exactly right…brought one hand up in a claw, the left one, the other fist back toward his chin.

"Not quite," he muttered to himself. He shifted his weight another degree or two and grinned. "Perfect," he said.

"Or close to it," a low voice growled nearby.

Gohan's eyes widened, then slowly slid to the right.

Cymbal was standing by the cave door. His arms were loosely folded, his bright red eyes were narrowed to a pair of cuts in his face. And he looked like he was pissed.

"Who taught you that stance, boy," he asked. Demanded.

Gohan swallowed. Blinked his eyes to see if he was dreaming.

He wasn't. Cymbal was still there – his skin more yellow-green than Piccolo's, looking alien and fresh like the rain-watered grass, sharp around the edges. Gohan swallowed again. "N…none of your business," he said. He wished he could have made it sound braver, like his dad or Piccolo would have said it.

"That so," Cymbal said. He walked forward slowly…too slowly…full of a strange, predatory edge that Gohan had never seen in Piccolo. The large demon knelt down to his level, and slid his tongue over too-white fangs. "It's fighting, kid," he said. "And it's my style. So that makes it my business. Who taught you?"

Gohan rotated his stance so that he was facing Cymbal – and out of the corners of his eyes, he could see a dark shadow on either side of him. The other two fighters, he forgot their names…Drum? Piano?...but they were off to the side, making a triangle of sorts with Cymbal.

Gohan realized then that he was in REAL trouble.

"Nevermind," Cymbal said. "I think I know anyway."

"You do?" Gohan asked.

"Mmhmm." Cymbal rocked back on his heels, still kneeling in front of him. "You know now I'm going to have to kill you," he said conversationally.

Gohan's eyes narrowed. "No way," he said. "You better leave me alone."

Cymbal reached over all of three feet, almost too fast to see, and gave Gohan's shoulder a hard push in just the right direction to knock him over. Gohan hit the dirt hard, rolled to his feet, or tried – Cymbal grabbed him by the ankle, and stood up.

And there Gohan was. Dangling upside down by the ankle.

He did the only thing that made sense to him. He hauled a foot back and kicked Cymbal's elbow as hard as he could, three times in a row.

The demon didn't even seem phased. He just…looked at Gohan with a funny expression on his face. Gohan growled in his throat, let his hand fill up with energy, threw it at his side, and watched that tiny ball of power glance off like a softball.

Cymbal didn't even twitch. Just smirked. "That it?" he asked.

Gohan bit his lip and tried to discreetly look around for Piccolo. Because Piccolo would be coming soon, he knew it. And, like any child, he started to voice that reality before it actually happened. "You better put me down," he said. He crossed his arms, too, and tried to look intimidating.

"Really? Why?"

"Because Mr. Piccolo'll be back any second, and you'll be really, really sorry," he said.

Cymbal chuckled. "You think he's coming back to save you?" he asked. "He's made a run for it if he knows a damn thing about life by now."

Gohan felt anger fill him up, and he kicked Cymbal again – the wrist, this time. "That's not true! He'll be here, and he'll kick your butt."

Cymbal outright laughed. "Damn," he said. "You're a mouthy one, aren't you? That's almost a shame."

"What is?" Gohan asked, still trying to look at once scowly and dramatic – or as much as he could while hanging upside down.

Cymbal tilted his head at him – an outright weird expression crossing his face. Like the one Gohan's mom got sometimes when she was looking for something, and then suddenly remembered where it was. "I think," he said, seemed to pause, then spoke again. "I think I've always liked kids," he said at last.

Gohan blinked.

"Just relax," Cymbal said, and that hard smirk was back again. "This'll be quick." He flexed his talons into hooks. Gohan closed his eyes.

And then, Gohan fell face-first into the dirt, there was a horrible foot-hitting-skin-sound, and he found himself staring up at the backs of Piccolo's legs. He scrambled to his feet. "Mr. Piccolo!" he exclaimed.

Piccolo did not say even a word. He was tense, and pulled tight like the string on a bow, chi so strained even Gohan could feel it. Piccolo put a rough hand on Gohan's head, shoved him further behind him. "What the Hell are you doing here," he growled at last, at Cymbal.

"Huh," Cymbal said. "Some welcome. I was in the neighborhood" And then both hands were claws, not just the one he'd been about to rip Gohan open with. "Thought I'd stop by."

Piccolo growled deeper. And Gohan noticed he was getting tenser. Piccolo was worried, which made Gohan worried.

Then, Gohan heard Piccolo's voice inside his head – sharp like a whip. _Alright, kid, listen up. This is gonna get bad. When they attack me, I'm going into the air. They'll follow. When that happens, I want you to run away as fast as you can. _

Gohan's eyes widened, and he thought back automatically, falling into this new kind of communication as only a child can fall into things: _But…but sir! I can't run and leave you all by yourself here, and besides…I don't know where to run! And what if they catch me? And how will you find me once you get done fighting the…_

The boy experienced the mental version of a smack upside the head. _Don't be stupid. _Piccolo's thoughts in his mind were all red and purple tangled together. _When I tell you to run, boy, you RUN. No argument. _

_Y…yes sir. _

Cymbal chuckled, breaking the silence. "So quiet, Piccolo," he said. "Don't you want to argue a little?"

Piccolo smirked. "No," he said.

"Then I'll argue for you. You don't have to do this."

Piccolo's eyes narrowed.

Impossibly, something in Cymbal's expression seemed less hard to Gohan for a second or two. "You think this is so much better," he said. "You really think you're gonna be able to live out here like this forever?" Cymbal casually jerked his thumb toward what Gohan guessed was probably civilization. "They'll never accept you as one of them, and they'll never let you share air with them if they can help it. So what's that leave you? Hiding in caves the rest of your life?"

Piccolo's nose creased so deep it made shadows. "You'd never understand," he said.

"No. You don't." Cymbal shook his head, his words softening a little. "Maybe you don't want to be one of us anymore – but that's what you are. This is a war, Piccolo, and nobody should know that better than you. So you might as well win it. How's it better to try to be something you're not?"

Piccolo laughed – a short, sharp sound. "All these years," he said. "You've never once really looked at me."

"There are some things," Cymbal said, "that you're just born to do. No one can fight that. Not even you."

Piccolo smirked. "Then I guess you were born to die here?"

"Alright, brat," Cymbal said, a weird grin in his voice. "Have it your way."

"Thanks," Piccolo said. "I think I will."

Gohan was literally knocked off his feet by what happened next, even though he couldn't see it. There was wind, a roaring sound, and then there were shapes above him, flying through the air like wasps. He stared up at it, eyes wide, for the first time seeing what fighting is. Not the nice tapping of most tournaments, not the staged stuff he saw on tv, and not the kind of fighting you see in cartoons. This was real. Horrible, snappy sounds of impact, growls, grunts, the hissing noise of tearing flesh.

Closing his eyes, Gohan rolled to his feet and ran, just like Piccolo told him to. He had to open them when he stumbled, scrambled a few feet, ran again with gravel in his hands. Blood was rushing in his ears, his head pounding in a horrible rhythm, his thoughts full of just run, run, run.

He thought he heard a scream. He didn't know whose it was. He kept running.

The sky lit up like a strobe light was going off, and Gohan paused. Turned to look back. He couldn't really see what was going on. Just distant flashes, lights…pulses like when jets fly by, and the air shakes from it…muffled noise, like distant thunder.

And then, all at once, he understood why it didn't matter how Piccolo was going to find him. Because he wasn't going to. He wasn't. He was going to fight those three big, scary people, and they were going to rip him to pieces, like he'd watched, one night in the desert, a pack of hyenas rip an antelope apart. And he'd cried hard until Piccolo told him that was just the way it worked sometimes.

…but it wasn't right. Gohan turned slowly back toward the fight, bit his lip. Took a step forward – maybe he could help? But Piccolo had told him to run. He took a step back. But what if…

_Mr. Piccolo? _he tried. And like that, he was part of it.

_Shoot through the air like an arrow, half-twist and duck, bring leg around at the 90 degrees and use the rotation. Dig into side, snap just a little, and damn, that rib almost broke, almost, he was close. Sharp, surprising pain of claws down the back, reverse the elbow to the face, pitch forward – damnit, got to get him off me – kick straight back, drop to avoid the punch…wait, haven't seen Piano…where did he…_

A voice echoed around Gohan. "Hey, kid," it said. "Have a nice run?"

Gohan prayed for a second that it was part of what he was hearing from Piccolo. But it wasn't. He turned around slowly.

He came face-to-knees with Piano.

"Don't have time to draw this out," the big warrior said. He inclined his head back to the fight on the horizon. "They're gonna need a hand. So…got any last words?"

Gohan did, actually. And they were 100 percent reflex. "MASENKO-HA!" he screamed so hard it hurt his throat, closed his eyes, and pushed both hands out at Piano with every ounce of strength he had.

* * *

Piccolo felt the blast happen on the outer corner of his mind, like seeing something out of the side of his vision, and he knew immediately what had gone wrong. Because of course, Cymbal would have planned for this, and of course, the kid was the real target.

He kicked his older brother right in the teeth, reversed himself in the air, and shot his body toward Gohan like a bullet. None of this was planned. He was operating at that utterly instinctual, adrenaline-flooded level that he always came to in a fight for his life – and one of his base instincts was screaming at him to get to the kid as fast as he could. In the back of his mind, which was NOT occupied with staying alive, he made a mental note to be really, really pissed about that later.

The air roared around him. And he heard an answering roar. It had taken Cymbal and Drum a fraction of a second to adjust to this latest tactic, which he was sure looked a Hell of a lot like "run away."

That was alright. Piccolo was faster than Drum. And at a sprint, he was pretty sure he was faster than Cymbal, who wouldn't be in a hurry to try to catch him. No, Cymbal would pace himself, just exactly like a wolf, would reserve that burst of speed for when Piccolo's lungs were already starting to burn. When he didn't have enough juice left to go any faster.

Except Piccolo wasn't running away, and he just needed to stay out in front for about five seconds. After that, it might not matter.

Piccolo landed so hard he stumbled, caught himself on a hand, looked up.

Gohan had managed, somehow, not to be reduced to a smear of grease on a rock. Was dodging blows from a bemused-looking Piano. Was still very much alive, even though the air smelled like Ozone. Damn. So the kid had some survival instincts after…

"Mr. Piccolo!" The boy cried suddenly.

…or maybe not.

Piano spun around, but Piccolo managed to put a blast in his face anyway, smirking with deep satisfaction as his brother stumbled backward. And then Gohan, much to his surprise, hit Piano with a blast from behind, kicked the back of a leg so he'd fall, managed somehow not to get landed-on. And Piccolo was of course about to tell him, again, to run. That he'd try to hold them.

He didn't have the time.

Instinctively, he'd expected Cymbal to dive down and hit him from the side in the fliers-version of a tackle…because Cymbal liked to hit things more than he liked to blast them. But this time, he felt an energy ball land between his shoulders – it sent him face-first for what he was pretty sure was a record distance.

The sand cut. So did the rocks. There was dust in his eyes, it was hard to breathe, and it was just like that time, all those years ago after that tournament, when he'd fallen out of the sky and onto the sand. His eyes opened, and the sand glowed in front of him, just like with moonlight, but this time, he could still get up. Pulled his legs under himself, quickly.

It didn't help. A knee hit his shoulder, then a hand hit the back of his head, and he was being wrenched onto his knees by the arms, which two people were suddenly holding – Piano and Drum, he realized, not that this was surprising.

And he could maybe still get loose. But probably not in time.

"Leave him alone!" he heard, and running feet, and damned if the kid wasn't running at them like he actually intended to do something about it.

He didn't make it to them. Cymbal materialized in front of him. And Gohan bounced off his leg and landed on the ground, actually dazed from how hard he had collided. Cymbal hadn't even moved.

Piccolo ground his teeth together, tried to kick out with his left leg, but he knew he wasn't getting loose that way. He could see the end of the story coming. And he could do nothing to change it.

He remembered, again, the broken shape of Son Goku stretched out in the mud.

Piccolo clenched his eyes against the blinding light he was maybe just imagining in Cymbal's hand. _No, no, no, you stupid little monkey, when I say run, this is why you run. _

Gohan either didn't hear him or didn't care. He clenched both his fists, and jumped back up to his feet. "I said leave him _alone_," he yelled almost straight up at Cymbal.

Piccolo didn't want to watch it. But he couldn't help himself, after all.

Cymbal chuckled. "Can't promise that," he said. "But I can do this much for you."

And the light was real, red-tinted and growing around Cymbal's hand. "I can make sure you don't have to see it."

Gohan was _mad._ Piccolo had never seen the kid outright mad before. And if he had more power, that would be a good thing, but of course he didn't, and…then something else caught Piccolo's attention. On the very outside edge of his brain, there was a tingling, a warning signal, a sure sign that something bad was about to happen.

The sense that he was standing right next to some very high explosives.

Cymbal did not notice. But then, Cymbal was mindblind, and he would not have been able to sense it. The elder demon smirked a little further, pointed his hand at Son Gohan. "Say hi to you dad for me," he said. "We go way back, y'know."

An alarm bell went off in Piccolo's head. He would later not be able to say how the Hell he'd done it, but he pitched his whole body forward suddenly, hard enough to wrench his left arm out of the socket, but also hard enough to get his two brothers to drop him for that very critical hundredth of a second. He hit the dirt, tucked both hands over the back of his head, and clenched his eyes shut.

The world exploded in white and thunder.


	6. Chapter 6

It was all Son Goku's fault somehow. Piccolo wasn't sure how that logic worked, exactly, but he was pretty sure it did. And since he was probably going to have all eternity to smooth out the particulars, he didn't worry about it too much.

For the moment, he was content to drift in and out of lucidity. He felt like he'd earned a break; after all, so far that day, he'd had a minor existential crisis, gotten into a fight with three competent warriors, and gotten blown to smithereens by his own student. He seriously doubted it was even midday yet. It was, he decided, a crappy way to die. But it could also have been a lot worse; at least it had been quick.

He wondered how it would go in the afterlife, when he got there. Whether he'd have to stand in line with his brothers, if they'd wind up pointing fingers and blaming each other the whole way to the check-in station. Dear gods, he could see it now – he could imagine it in his head as clearly as if it were happening right before his eyes.

For the first several seconds, no one would say anything. They would all just stand stiffly, arms crossed, glaring in any direction except at each other, except for Piano, who would probably be staring at all the pretty clouds, or watching the little winged secretary-demons flitting around like stupid, nerdy hummingbirds.

Cymbal would break the silence first. Because Cymbal, of them all, was by far the shortest on patience. He would turn his head very slowly for effect, and he would fix Piccolo with the angriest red-eyed glare in the world. "Well," he'd say, "I HOPE you're pleased with yourself."

Piccolo would strive with every fiber of his being to project 'unimpressed.' "I don't remember inviting you to come out and start hitting me, asshole. This one's on you."

Drum would look between them for a second, think about it. "It WAS your stupid idea," he would growl.

Cymbal would roll his eyes. "The IDEA was fine. I'M not the idiot who let the kid run off to start with!"

Drum would growl deeper. "Oh, because keeping ahold of the kid would have been a great idea! He was a little time bomb!"

"Well, how the Hell was I supposed to know that? Do I have "Miss Cleo the Fucking Psychic" tattooed on my forehead?!"

And it would go on like that, for however many hours it took for judgment to be passed upon them.

Oh yes, that's right. There was going to be a judgment. That wonderful time of life and death where you get to stand in a crummy office and listen to the long list of wrongs you had done. For the first time, Piccolo found cause to regret not living a more meritous life. The kind where you drop money in salvation army bins, go to temple, and be nice to people. Because Son Goku was almost certainly through the line already and on his merry way to heaven, and damn it, Piccolo really, really wanted to track him down and punch him square in the face. Because it was all his fault Piccolo wasn't ruling the world by now and torturing millions, instead of getting blown to pieces by the son of his arch-enemy in the middle of a family dispute that even Jerry Springer wouldn't have touched.

But of course, it wouldn't happen that way. Both of them would stay dead, sure, but Son would stay dead in heaven, and Piccolo would stay dead in Hell, probably with his three brothers, who were probably about as ready to punch him in the face as he was ready to punch Son Goku.

Life, he decided, was simply not fair. Especially not since he was dead.

"Piccolo" a voice said nearby.

Piccolo opened his eyes, and squinted up. Immediately, he closed them again. Damn. The light at the end of the tunnel was a Hell of a lot brighter than he thought good taste really called for. Theatrics were one thing, but damn, he WOULD like to spend the rest of eternity able to see more than basic outlines.

"What," he growled. _And, _he thought, _how come I get a gravelly old voice instead of, I dunno, singing angels or something? _

"We don't have much time."

It was Kami's voice. Piccolo kept his wrist over his eyes, forced himself to squint up at the wizened face.

"Oh, great," he said. "Just who I wanted to see."

Kami rolled his eyes. Which beneficient deities should not do, as far as Piccolo was concerned. "You're not dead," he said.

"What the Hell do you mean I'm not dead?" Piccolo asked. He turned his head to one side, pointed. "You see that? Yellow clouds. There are NO yellow clouds in the desert."

"You're having a near death experience," Kami conceded, a little too archly.

Piccolo sat up slowly. "Okay," he said. "Shouldn't I be able to look down on my body and see it getting smaller and smaller or something?"

"We really don't have time for that," Kami said.

"What the Hell is this," Piccolo said. "Did you get us the economy package, or what?"

"Piccolo, honestly. We have no time for sarcasm, either."

"There is ALWAYS time for sarcasm," Piccolo growled. "Now what's the rush."

Kami looked, well, nervous. "We're in a lot of trouble," he said.

Piccolo gave him his very best "no shit" look.

"Oh. No, not with the near-death issue. You see, to make this quick, the Saiyan that you and Goku fought was not the only one of his kind. There are two more. And they're very annoyed at both you and Goku for killing one of their number. They are also interested in Earth, from a purely…ah…economic standpoint."

Piccolo flopped back onto his back. "What you're telling me," he said, "is that intergalactic nutjob had backup."

"Yes."

"And they're as strong as he was?"

"Well, no."

Piccolo nodded. It was good to hear good news once in a while.

"They're…actually much stronger."

Piccolo really hated Kami, sometimes. "Alright," he said. "So if I'm not hallucinating this whole mess, which is possible, what do you expect me to do about it?"

"You won't be alone," he said. "Goku has already begun his journey to train under King Kai, a legendary master of the martial arts. He'll help you. And so will Gohan, if you can teach him to control himself."

"See, I have this really great idea," Piccolo said. "I'm going to just close my eyes, and think real hard about not breathing."

Kami smiled wryly, and shook his head. "I know it's hard," he said. "But you'll thank the fates for this someday, I promise."

"No, you're not listening," Piccolo said. "I'm not doing it. There's no way this can possibly be my job."

Kami sighed. "That is your prerogative," he said. "But I, for one, intend to live and do what I can."

Piccolo smirked. "Don't you kind of need me for that?" he asked.

Kami nodded.

"Well, then, it sucks to be…" Piccolo was brought up short as Kami pulled a bucket of water from behind his robes. "What the Hell are you…"

Kami heaved the bucket of water squarely into his face.

* * *

Piccolo choked, flailed his right arm (the left one just hurt a lot). He couldn't see, had to roll onto his side to spit out water from his nose and mouth. That damned old man was going to learn the MEANING of pain just as soon as he could see straight aga…

"Mr. Piccolo!!!" a familiar, if hoarse and sniffly, voice cried from beside him.

Piccolo opened one bleary eye.

Son Gohan was standing half-over him, a hollowed-out gourd empy in his hands. He'd very obviously just used it to carry water over to him and splash him with it.

The kid, Piccolo thought, looked like absolute Hell. His eyes were rimmed around with purple and swollen, his clothes were torn and bloody, so that the orange uniform Piccolo gave him looked like it had been tie-dyed with purple. The worst, though, was the look on his dirt-smeared face; like he'd accidentally run over his own cat.

With an effort, Piccolo spoke. "Yeah," he managed to breathe out, by way of answer.

That fast, the kid was on him, both arms encircling his neck, and just sobbing a lot of incoherent words together. Which mostly kept coming back to "are you okay," and, "I'm so, so sorry, I didn't mean it, I didn't mean it."

Piccolo was so taken aback by this that he couldn't say anything at first. Reflexively, he brought his good arm up, and gave the boy an awkward pat on the back. "It's fine," he said, at last.

Gohan pulled back a little. "It is NOT," he said fiercely. But then that moment of aggression was over; his bottom lip came out. "I hurt you bad," he said. "Really…bad." His little white hands were soaked up to the forearms in purple blood.

Piccolo chuckled in spite of himself. "It's not that bad," he said. Even though a million aches were welling up to tell him that this was very much not the case. It WAS bad. But he was very definitely going to live through it.

The boy didn't even seem to acknowledge that comment, though he did seem to be trying to catch his breath and get his sobbing under control. This kind of emotional turmoil, Piccolo decided, was out of his league. Finally, he spoke again. "Enough of that," he said. "You did the right thing."

Piccolo's charge looked up at him again, his face even more tear-streaked than it had been before. "Really?"

Piccolo started to shrug, then thought better of it. "They would have killed you," he said. "And probably me right after, if we're being completely honest here."

The kid didn't look like he bought a word of it. "But…"

Damnit. Desperate times called for desperate measures. "I owe you, kid," he said.

"And you're really gonna be okay?"

Piccolo snorted. "Don't be so eager to get your ass kicked in another sparring match," he said. "I'll be up and around again in a couple of days."

For the first time, Gohan looked hopeful. "You promise?"

"Sure," Piccolo said. Then he collapsed back on one elbow, realizing he was already spent.

Much to his surprise, the kid actually put both hands on his chest and pushed him down. "You better rest," he said. "Stay put – I know something that'll help." And then he was running off to who-knew-where, probably to nearly get himself killed again.

_If so,_ Piccolo thought, _Kami better deal with it. You hear that, old man? You owe me that much. _

He closed his eyes, content with this line of reasoning, and counted the seconds until Gohan's return.

"Hey, Pic," said a voice – an impossibly cheerful voice – from beside him.

Piccolo forced that left eye back open. And looked straight up at Son Goku. The Saiyan was apparently kneeling over him; his features were hard to make out, as the sun was bright behind his head, almost like a halo.

Piccolo closed his eye, then opened it again. Squinted. _Damn, _he thought. _I'm finally losing it. _

The Saiyan didn't look the way he had the last time Piccolo had seen him – used up, tired, wounded. He looked…bright. He smiled at him with that weird smile of his, tilted his head a little to the left. "You look rough," he said after a moment's assessment.

Piccolo decided he might as well talk to the hallucination. "Yeah," he said. "No shit."

"I guess it's been pretty hard on you, huh?"

"I'll live," Piccolo said, turning his eyes to the sky. The man had been dead for how long now, and he still couldn't stand to look at him. "Which is more'n I can say for you."

Goku chuckled. "Yeah. I guess that's true."

"You realize," Piccolo said, "that I blame you for this. Entirely."

Goku blinked. Piccolo couldn't see him. But he knew he'd blinked. "Me?"

"Yes, Son. You. You got me into this whole…you…and your damned…" he paused. Took a deep breath. Admitted it. "Fine," he said. "So it's not _all_ your fault."

"But you're still gonna blame me, huh?"

"Damn straight."

"I guess I can live with that. Figuratively speaking, I mean."

Piccolo smirked, still with his eyes closed. "Now I know you're a hallucination," he said. "The real Son Goku couldn't even _spell_ that."

Goku sounded offended. "Hey! I can too."

"Prove it."

"…okay, you got me there."

"Thought so. And while we're on the subject, why'm I hallucinating _you_ instead of…I dunno, purple dinosaurs or something."

"Um…Pic…do you usually hallucinate purple dinosaurs?"

Piccolo rolled his eyes, mentally. "That was not the point," he said. "The point is, why am I talking to you when you're very obviously not here?"

"Well, I dunno – why are you?"

"Because," Piccolo said. "I can't think of a good reason not to."

"No offense, Pic," Goku said, shifting to sit lotus-style beside him. "But you have got to be the weirdest person in the entire world. That doesn't make any kind of sense."

"Look who's talking," Piccolo said, opening his eyes to look over at him. "The monkey-boy who rides around on a little yellow cloud."

"At least I'm not a green guy in a turban."

"Oh, ha ha," he grumbled. "Would you like to make fun of my ears next?"

Goku put his elbow on his knee, his chin in his palm, and chuckled. "What I'd like is for you to get some rest. Seriously, Pic, You look like you've been hit by a bus. A really big one. With mud on the tires."

"I was resting just fine until you showed up," Piccolo said.

Goku grinned. "You mean you were sulking. Again."

"I was not s…"

"Shh." And the Saiyan put a light hand on his shoulder – hesitant, as if afraid of hurting him. Just like before, years ago…the onetime demon felt his throat constrict, suddenly. "You can yell at me when I'm alive again. Right now, you need sleep."

Piccolo started to put a hand under himself to get up. "But the kid's…"

"I'll keep an eye on Gohan." Son's eyes crinkled just slightly around the edges. "You too, while I'm at it. Don't worry about a thing."

Piccolo thought about arguing with the hallucination some more about the logistics of a nonexistent Son Goku watching over much of anything – but that seemed like a level of crazy he just wasn't comfortable with entering yet. "Fine," he said.

He felt the back of his head lifted, felt it come to rest on the soft fabric over the other's leg. It felt real. And for once, he didn't protest the treatment, or even the idea of having someone else take care of him. Instead, he let his eyes close again, this time without planning to open them.

Sleep had never felt so good.

* * *

It took Gohan a while to find the right kind of plant. He thought it should have stuck out more: a big, flat leaf shaped like a lemon drop. Especially among all the browns and reds of the sand and the clay, it should have been easy to find.

Unless maybe it didn't grow in the desert. He guessed that was always possible, but he didn't want to believe it – darting in between the large rocks, looking at all of the shady places where the plant would usually be. It didn't take long, on brittle shale, for him to skin up his knees or his hands, but for once, that was the farthest thing from his mind.

He was trying not to think at all, past the idea of finding the plant. Every time he let his brain open up to other things, it filled up with terrible things: the mixed up, dusty fighting, the feeling of burning inside his skin, the brief look of disbelief on Cymbal's face as the white light spread up and out like a breaking wave, the smell of skin burning, which was like meat cooked too long – the way he'd found Piccolo after, half against the rocks, body flung up like the survivor of a shipwreck once the wave was gone. How first, he'd found two bodies, scorched to the texture of charcoal. How their burnt hands looked, blackened into claws that seemed to reach…

No, just the plant. The plant was important.

And he couldn't find it.

Close to tears again, Gohan sat down heavily at the bottom of the canyon, and pressed his hand to his forehead as he willed himself to keep from crying. He couldn't be a crybaby now; Mr. Piccolo needed him.

"Now think, Gohan," he said to himself. "Think. What would your father do?"

That was an easy one. His father would've beaten the snot out of all three of the other fighters, and not blown Mr. Piccolo up, and this would never have happened to him at all.

But if it _had_happened…if it had happened, he'd know exactly where to find the stupid plant, or he'd fly until he knew where some was, or something like that. He sure wouldn't be sitting on his butt at the bottom of a canyon wondering what someone else would have done.

Gohan closed his eyes. Which didn't help a whole lot in the desert; it was so bright that the light shone right through his eyelids sometimes. But he did it anyway, and he tried hard to picture the few camping trips he'd been on, when he'd inevitably scrape an arm or an elbow, and his father would find something to put on it. Taking deep breaths, the boy tried to picture his father, tried to remember every word…

He could almost see him. Bright and orange, smiling in a way that seemed stuck between gentle and sad. _It's alright, Gohan – I know it hurts. Come on, down here in the shady places by the water. It only grows where there's water. _

His imagined-father pointed, like he would have at home…down past the yard, to where a stream ran through the trees. Gohan knew it wasn't real, but something urged him to follow anyway; he stood up slowly, and started to walk the way that the mirage-Goku had pointed. .

At the side of the bluff, water trickled down the side into a shallow, muddy puddle. It was brackish and thick, nothing like the clear stream behind the house, but it was wet. And right next to it was a small cluster of teardrop-shaped leaves.

Gohan reached out a trembling hand, half afraid that the leaves were imaginary too; but he could feel the satiny edges of them under his fingertips. Then he was plucking them by the handful, disregarding the thorns on the stem. And then as he rocked back, and stared down at the mass of green cradled in his forearms, he began to think that things might be okay, after all. Eventually.

He stood up as soon as he felt like he could, and started the hard climb back to where Piccolo was. If he had looked up, he might have seen a hazy orange form hanging in the air behind him, perhaps a reflection of sand on heat-distorted air, perhaps his imagination.

But Gohan was concentrating hard on climbing the rocks. He did not look up.


	7. Chapter 7

Son Goku opened his eyes.

For a second, he was sure that he was still in the desert. He wasn't sure how he got there or why, but he'd been there; he could almost still feel the sand on his face, the painful dryness in his mouth. And Gohan had been there, and Piccolo, and they'd both been torn up and bloody, and they'd _needed _him, and he'd been there, but sort of like a ghost, or like one of those dreams where you can see them, but they can't see you.

It was all jumbled around in his head somehow – but he closed his eyes again and took the time to piece it out. That's right. They'd been hurt somehow, in some kind of fight . Well, to rephrase, Piccolo'd been hurt, and Gohan was mostly worn out and scared – and he'd gone to help them. He'd been helping Gohan find a plant, or…something like that.

But something wasn't right. Goku didn't feel hot, or sandy, or even uncomfortable at all. And the sky wasn't hazy white-blue like the desert – it was pink, and there were a whole lot of Kintoens floating around.

Oh yeah, that's right. He was dead.

Goku sat up, feeling more like he was in a dream than he had when he was sleeping. He looked around at the weird arches and loops of Snake Way – even went so far as to touch the razor-sharp edge to make sure he was actually awake. He was. Or at least as awake as you can be when you're dead, which was a question he made up his mind to ask Kami just as soon as he got back. Right along with, "If I'm dead, why am I hungry," and, "how is it that I still fall down when I trip?"

"So…was I dreaming?" he asked out loud. He found he was talking to himself more and more lately, mainly because there was absolutely no one else to talk to except the occasional street-sweeper.

"I must have been," he answered. "Dreaming, I mean." As if the air needed clarification, he thought, and realized that his brain was starting to replicate Piccolo-esque sarcasm, which was probably a bad sign.

He sat back, drew his knees up to his chest, and thought about that some more, but couldn't come up with any kind of good argument in favor of the dream not being a dream. "Right. It sure felt real, though."

Goku rocked once or twice, thought some more.

"…I should really stop talking to myself," he said.

Goku made himself stand up. "Right," he said. "So I'll do that. Man, if the guys could see me now, they'd think I'd gone off the deep end for sure."

Of course, he hadn't. That was one of his few advantages in this weird, pastel-colored place. He had lots of practice with living for months with no one to talk to but himself; after his grandfather died, he kept himself alive for years on end with no one to chat with but local predators. So, the way he figured it, if he hadn't gone crazy then, he wasn't going to now.

Unless he really HAD gone crazy back then. In which case, he sure didn't have anything to lose now, except maybe his lunch if he ran any more loop-de-loops at full tilt.

Goku stretched his legs carefully. _No_, he decided, _that's not completely true._ _Every time I even look at this road, I just get so…I get really tired. I've never been this tired, and it just keeps going. It feels like it's sucking something out of me every day. I just…I'm not sure I can do this. _

He shook his head and smirked to himself as an imaginary Piccolo appeared, looking for all the world like he wanted to drop-kick him for even thinking "can't." _Like "can" has anything to do with it anyway. I have to. _

Somehow, that made it easier.

"Okay, then," he said out loud. "Let's do this."

And, being Goku, he didn't even worry about the fact that he was now talking to himself in the plural first person.

* * *

Gohan was starting _really_ worry about Piccolo.

It wasn't just that his teacher was hurt, or that he was hurt bad, or that there were no other grownups around to help. It was that Piccolo was acting really, really weird.

Case in point – when he'd made his way back to Piccolo with the plant, Piccolo had _laughed. _Outright laughed, and Gohan had NEVER heard Piccolo laugh before, ever. He didn't even know Piccolo COULD laugh, and once he heard it, he decided it was probably good that he didn't laugh very often. It was a little bit scary. Not a lot scary, like with Cymbal, but a little bit.

"Uh, sir," he said. "It's…um…"

"I know what it is," Piccolo said. "I know exactly what it is."

"So it's okay if I…"

"Yes," Piccolo said. And lay back, and let Gohan tend to the worst of his wounds.

Gohan had never SEEN real wounds before.

They weren't like his textbook said they should be. They weren't like his own little cuts and scrapes that had seemed so ugly and horrible at the time. No. These were real, and deep, and they smelled like something that should hurt, copper and ozone. He could still see them, sometimes, behind his eyelids when he stopped in his patching to wipe his hands off – great rips in the skin, the edges pulled back like an orange peel from the meaty fruit underneath. It would, he decided, probably give him nightmares forever.

But when he finished, and Piccolo didn't immediately tell him to get lost, he settled down beside him and put his head on Piccolo's shoulder. And Piccolo didn't push him away, yell at him, say anything. He just put his hand on his back and closed his eyes like he was sleeping, even though he wasn't.

Gohan started to think he really _was_ dying.

"Sir," he said.

"Hm?"

"Are you gonna be okay?"

Piccolo looked down at him. And Gohan realized that Piccolo had never looked at him like that before. Like for once, he didn't know what to say. "As okay as I ever was," he said.

Gohan's brow wrinkled. "What does that mean?" he asked.

"It means…" Piccolo closed his eyes again. "Forget what it means," he said.

"Can I do something else?" Gohan asked.

"Yes."

"Like what?" Gohan sat up. "Do you need water? Because I can go get water. Or food, I know where there's lots to eat, I mean, if you don't mind berries and mushrooms because that's all I can really find, but some of it's pretty good, and…"

"Kid," Piccolo said. "What you can do for me is be quiet. I'm very tired."

Gohan blinked. "Oh," he said. "Oh. Sorry, sir. I'll be quiet. But if there's anything else I can…"

"Gohan," Piccolo said. His lip twitched, almost a smile. "Shut up."

Gohan stared at Piccolo in quiet shock. "You called me Gohan," he said.

Piccolo opened one eye warningly.

"Sorry," Gohan said. He lay back down next to him, half expecting Piccolo to shove him off, but he didn't. He just lay still, kind of sighed.

Gohan tucked himself a little closer. He decided he'd better not sleep because Piccolo was going to be sleeping, and one of them should probably keep watch. He made himself comfortable as best he could, crossed his arms, and closed his eyes like Piccolo did when he was meditating – quiet and still, but somehow knowing exactly what was going on around him at all times. Gohan figured he could do worse than try it.

He must have fallen asleep without meaning to, because when Gohan opened his eyes, it was because he was on the ground. Piccolo wasn't. Or at least, he wasn't totally. He was kneeling, one hand resting on the scorched-up sand, and it looked like he was thinking about standing up.

Gohan jumped to his feet before he finished thinking about it. "Mr. Piccolo," he said, too quickly, he knew. "Maybe you shouldn't, sir, it's…"

"Shh," Piccolo said, calm as he'd ever been.

"But…"

Piccolo shot him that warning glare again. Gohan obligingly shut up.

It took him a few minutes. But finally, Piccolo seemed to decide that he could do it. He stood up slow, like Gohan's grandfather did on cold mornings when his arthritis was bothering him, but he stood up, his face pulled together with the strain.

"What now, sir?" Gohan asked.

Piccolo shook his head at him. "I'm going to look around," he said. Then he started limping back toward where the worst part of the fighting had happened.

Gohan followed.

* * *

The section of desert where the actual fight had happened looked like the scene of a bizarre natural disaster – something between chain lightning and a tornado. At the epicenter, the sand was fused to black glass, slick like a polished car. All around, the once-white sand was blackened to soot. Scorched foliage that might once have been scrub brush waved silently in the wind.

Piccolo eyed the devastation and wondered if he really wasn't cut out for raising children. In fact, he wondered for a brief moment or two if he'd be better off to send the boy to a more competent guardian. Like his father. In the afterlife.

But the time for that was past, and he knew it, so Piccolo took a deep breath and let it out through his nose to clear it of soot. "Damn," he said to the boy who, he realized, was standing behind his leg, clutching at his gi-pants and staring at the scene with obvious horror. "You sure know how to end a party, don't you."

Gohan buried his face in the back of his leg. "I didn't mean to," he said. "I didn't. It just happened."

"Sure did. And it looks like it happened everywhere," Piccolo said. He prodded at something black with his foot. A mangled rock? No...less solid. He prodded it again, and it unfolded itself – and only his years of experience with gore and unpleasantness kept him from reacting.

It was an arm.

Specifically, it was an arm about the size of one of Piccolo's – scorched almost beyond recognition, still glowing a little at the fingertips, which were almost, almost ash. Scorched remains of familiar, fingerless gloves fluttered as barely-there-embers against what was left of the skin.

Piccolo recognized it right away. It was Cymbal's arm – the one he'd been using to hold the boy, no doubt blown clear off his body with the force of the outward push. He looked around, but there was no sign of the rest of the body; Piano and Drum, sure, he recognized them as the twisted, black heaps on either side of the blast zone, landed sprawled like crash-test dummies. But they had been farther away.

"Walk with me," Piccolo said, and when the kid didn't immediately let go of his leg, he picked him up and settled him in the crook of his arm, beginning to pick his way around the blast zone. He didn't think he'd find anything alive, but hard experience had taught him to make sure.

All told, he spent half an hour looking. He went from the glittery, glass edges of the blast all the way to a nearby cliff, peering over the edge, eyeing the water below for any of the familiar colors – indigo, black, green.

Nothing.

He stood still for a long moment at the edge of that drop, feeling the wind push against his back, no doubt frosting his gi with tiny black particles that might once have been part of his older brother. He struggled briefly with an unfamiliar rise of nausea, but that, like everything else he'd been feeling lately, went into the category of don't-have-time-for-it and was promptly shoved as far down into his own awareness as he could push it.

"Say this much for you," he said to the boy he was still holding, who had buried his face in his uniform and was apparently trying his best NOT to see any of it, "you're thorough."

Gohan made a bizarre whimpering sound and said nothing.

Piccolo snorted. "Buck up, it had to happen sooner or later," he said.

Muffled, against his shirt, "I don't like to hurt anyone. Mom says it's wrong, and Dad says…"

If there was anyone Piccolo did NOT want to hear advice from at that moment, it was Son Goku. "Yeah, well, they had it coming," Piccolo interrupted matter-of-factly. Then, more quietly, "Do you think you could do it again?"

Gohan looked up at him. "I don't want to do it again," he said, eyes wide.

"Yeah, well, it's an unfair fact of life, kiddo. If you hadn't –" Piccolo gestured to the blackened forms of Drum and Piano, "you and me, we'd be the ones looking like a couple of birds that sat on the wrong power line."

"That's terrible," Gohan said.

"Yeah, well, it's…" Piccolo trailed off, feeling a familiar prickle in the back of his mind. He turned his face up toward the sky and squinted against all the brightness, able to pick out a distant, small dot – and he made a mental note to kick the old turtle hermit next time he saw him. Why anyone would think bright orange was a good color for a fighting uniform was sure to Hell beyond him. "Great," he said. "More company."

"…company?" Gohan asked.

"Your dad's pet midget," Piccolo said.

"Krillen!" Gohan said, his small face lighting up.

Piccolo decided he didn't have the heart to tell him that Krillen wouldn't be coming out to see them with good news.


	8. Chapter 8

Krillen hated flying over the desert.

It was a holdover from the old days, he knew. The days before the Demon King Piccolo had been killed. Back then, the demons – Piccolo's family – and other, lesser demon-things that had crawled out from who-knew-where had joined together. They had been doing their best to eliminate everyone on earth, and no one, not a single one of them, not even Goku, had been strong enough to fight them all at once.

It was hit and run for years. Mostly run. A fine line they'd all tried to walk for years – pop up often enough to keep the demons from murdering everyone else on the planet, not often enough to get themselves all killed.

They were lucky, at least, in that the Demon King had realized that they were the only things on the planet that were dangerous to him. He'd insisted that they wipe them out first, because they gave people hope, and because once they were dead, the rest would be easy.

Those were hard years. Years of watching the sky, and counting the seconds between explosions like you would for lightning, trying to decide how far away, how long, whether or not you could get to whatever town it was in time to save anyone. Whether it was worth the risk.

Making that decision – whether or not to try to protect the human population of earth – was hard on all of them, though none of them took it as badly as Goku. He never complained. Never punched trees or cursed or railed against it like the rest of them did. No, Krillen still remembered how his old friend, barely half grown with wild hair and eyes too big for his face, had sat in the pine needles in the blue-colored evening, watching the distant flares of red and orange through the branches.

Kami had been with them then. Had stood white-colored like a ghost in the darkness, his face and hands disappearing into the dark around them as he explained to his favorite student – gently, always gently – that he had to make hard choices because he had to last.

Goku never argued with him. He just breathed out fog, pressed his forehead to his bo, and clenched his hands on it until his knuckles were white.

That time had changed his friend, Krillen knew. Not that it showed too much, most of the time. He still smiled, he always had, still kept that bright, stupid optimism, even when it repeatedly almost got him killed. But before the Demon King Piccolo, Son Goku had avoided killing like he avoided seeing a real doctor. After, while he still shied away from it, he would do it if pushed to it. And there were times, as those hard years dragged on, when Krillen would look over at his friend and see an expression on his face that frightened him a little. A sharp, narrow-eyed glare that wasn't at all human.

It made Goku's weird…trust? Friendship?...with the demon king's youngest son that much stranger in Krillen's eyes. If there was anybody on earth he should have hated, should have blamed for all the crap that went wrong, it should have been Piccolo. But Goku didn't. He never had.

And, the monk admitted to himself, Goku was right. Because when Goku had come for _him_, to save him from Cymbal, Piccolo had come for Goku. Without wanting to, he remembered the last time he'd seen the big demon – when Piccolo and Cymbal had collided in the sky like a pair of rabid dogs, and then after. The kind of wild, uncontrolled fighting they'd all tried their hardest to avoid during the hit-and-run days.

They were all, Krillen thought, more careful back then. They checked the sky before they flew anywhere, designed elaborate escape routes, stayed low. They stuck to dense, thick places as much as possible – swamps and forests; short, tough mountain ranges. Places where they could fly without leaving a silhouette against the sky, places where they could make a sharp turn and disappear.

Open places like plains, the desert – those were to be avoided at all cost. The demons had sharp eyesight and flew fast, and meeting up with a monster like Cymbal in the open sky was a worst-case scenario that no one wanted to think about.

It made Krillen wonder why Piccolo had come here. He would have known, same as any of them, that there was no hiding out here. Then again, Krillen thought. He pulled up in the air, stopped for a moment. Then again, you could see someone coming from miles away, too. Maybe outrun them if you were faster.

Or, he thought sourly, blast them right out of the sky before they saw you. "I must be a great target right now," he muttered. "Geeze, why don't I ever think of these things."

He looked around, the wide expanse of dirt and sky, and tried to decide what to do. To keep flying and risk being attacked, or to go back home and think of something else.

Then, he looked down at his uniform. The bright orange. His own white hands. "At least I don't look much like a demon," he said. "I guess Piccolo'll know the difference."

Then again, whether Piccolo was more or less likely to shoot him than his family, Krillen didn't really know.

* * *

The sun filtered down through the trees that grew near the river…not stunted, tough little shrubs, but ginko and sakura trees, fan leaves, white petals that formed fragile blankets in the stiller eddies.

All of which was completely lost on Cymbal, as he dug the talons of his remaining hand into the broken-up shale of the bank. They didn't catch right away. Dragged several inches through the sharp fragments, stuck under the nails and bled. But then they did catch - he didn't know on what and didn't care – and he could set about the business of dragging his far-too-heavy body out of the water.

He made it halfway before his arm shook and gave, and he reintroduced his face to the bank with a sharp houff.

To add insult to injury, his nose landed two inches from a dandelion. He swiped at it irritably, then blinked through fuzzy eyes. He was pretty sure Hell didn't have dandelions. Especially not dandelions with a lady bug tottering across the leaf.

"Holy Hell," he muttered, "I think I'm alive."

He glanced behind him, squinted to try to focus – the river gurgled and hissed, still felt cold to his legs – and forward. Ladybug on the dandelion.

Definitely alive, he decided. Being dead doesn't hurt this much.

Not that he was all that likely to stay alive. He didn't need to look to know that his severed arm was still bleeding, that he'd shattered more bones than he wanted to think about on the way down the cliff, even more during the churning end-over-end madness that had been the river earlier up – he couldn't remember it so well, supposed he must have blacked out.

Which, he decided, was probably going to happen again. Any second now, in fact. And he wasn't completely sure he cared. Because, for the first time in weeks, he could think straight again, or as straight as you ever think when you have a concussion. No more fog. No more weirdo disorientation. Just the facts, as near as he could see.

The demon king was dead, and he was never coming back.

Piccolo was nobody's reincarnation, which he'd always known, deep down. Because the demon king would never in a thousand years have taken up with that little monkey-tailed brat or his father.

That no matter how idiotic he was, he was proud of him for fighting him like that, for fighting that hard. Who cared about what. Not to say he wouldn't kill him for it later, mind, but that didn't make him feel any different about it.

That the giant monkey was real, and Tambourine probably knew that all along, too. That he'd known it and not said a word.

That if everything had gone as it was supposed to go, he has no doubt that he and Piccolo would have killed each other, that the stupid kid would have been caught in the crossfire some way or another, and Tambourine would have had the whole damn planet to himself.

Despite the injuries, he chuckled under his breath. "Set me up, didn't you, T. Same way you set him up. I live through this – big if, right now, I know – I live through this, swear to the gods..." he turned his head to spit blood out of his mouth. Grinned, roughly. Damn.

His ear flicked at a sound up the bank, and his first thought was that it was a deer. Light, quiet steps. He squinted up the bank.

A girl was standing on the bank above him. A human girl – he couldn't guess the age at all – but she had crow hair, almond eyes, and she was looking at him like you'd look at a bird that had snapped its neck on the window.

"Oh, brother," he said under his breath. "Just what I need."

The girl started back toward the road – he could see, if he squinted, what looked like a cart, hear some sort of animal stomping its hooves, nervous.

He must have blacked out for another few seconds, minutes maybe. The next thing he knew, she was kneeling beside him, drawing her skirt back to avoid the mixed puddle of water and blood.

"Lady," he growled, "this is probably a bad time." And normally, he would have cut her in half, because that's how he'd always dealt with humans. But his arm was stuck under his body, and she wasn't worth the effort. He doubted she could kill him anyway, even like this, without some kind of weapon. Was so damned small, too…couldn't have weighed more than a hundred pounds. He could crack her in half with the back of his wrist, even now, even like this, if he really felt like it.

Besides, she didn't seem inclined to kill him. She said something to him – and he was pretty sure he could hear her fine, but it was just gibberish to him, a bunch of sounds stuck together. Different language, he realized immediately. One he didn't know. She reached out a hand, touched his shoulder with her fingertips, drew her hand back quickly as if afraid of being burned.

"Take it you don't watch a lot of television," he said, "if you don't know who I am." The girl looked at him blankly, then at the sticky, purple liquid on her fingers. She bit her lip.

He laughed again, roughly, in spite of himself. "No survival instinct," he said, "the whole lot of you. Swear, was always like shooting fish in a…" he coughed. "Barrel."

Which was true enough. Anything was harder to kill than a big group of humans. Because they were too far removed from their pasts, milled in circles, clung to each other and screamed just in case some self-respecting demon was somehow stupid enough not to see them immediately. He wondered, sometimes, how they'd managed to survive as a people, even before his father and the demons who came with him had decided it'd be a service to the planet to wipe them all out.

Then again, this girl didn't seem to want to scream, or cling to anything. Instead, she touched his shoulder again. Seemed to be looking him over. Her color drained when she was able to see the other side of his body, the still-bleeding stump that had been an arm a few hours ago. He could see the small, blue veins in her face.

"See?" he rasped. "You're a lucky girl. I don't think I can move."

She pulled a sash from her waist, twisted it several times. Tied it tight around the stump, pulled. Looked, Cymbal decided, almost as green as he was as she did it.

He tried to focus. Tried, but it was getting harder. "Lady," he said again. "Are you stupid, or what?"

She said something to him in a tone he recognized – she was trying to reassure him. He snorted. "Unbelievable. Just like lemmings. You people really do want to die, don't you?"

But his vision wasn't so sharp, his lips were bloody, and he realized that he probably wasn't all that dangerous to her after all. "You're smart at all," he murmured. "You'll be gone when I wake up."

He somehow doubted she would be. Because humans were stupid that way.

_________________________________________________________________________

Krillen spotted them easy. Which should've been more encouraging than it was.

The two of them, Gohan and Piccolo, were standing in the middle of a charred spot over a mile wide, that smoked like the remains of a house fire. It smelled like burnt glass, burnt something else, possibly burnt- Bulma's- last -attempt at dinner.

Krillen had enough experience to know what that probably meant. That someone had died, or at least gotten scorched pretty badly. He began to think he might have come at a bad time. And maybe he should come back when it was more convenient. Like maybe in a month or two.

He was just getting ready to turn around and fly back toward the Kame house when Piccolo looked up and met his eyes square. His face was soot-stained and purple down one side, bloody too. It was swollen across one side of the jaw, and his expression said, plainer than words, don't insult me by thinking I haven't noticed you. Krillen spat a curse under his breath and stayed, feeling awkward and obvious in all the wrong ways, like a Christmas ornament hanging on a palm tree. Yeah. In the middle of the desert.

But Piccolo at least didn't blast him, and Gohan, who was against all common sense and reason cradled in Piccolo's left arm, was waving at him with a shaky grin on his face, like Krillen had once waved at Goku and Master Roshi from the other side of a ravine he'd jumped when he hadn't thought he could. When his legs were still buckling with the overpowering thought of "holy shit I'm alive."

Landing seemed like the right thing to do. So he did. The sand was more like broken glass than dirt. It crunched under his boots.

Piccolo didn't move from where he was standing. Probably because taking a step forward or backward was r_eacting_, and would actually make Krillen's life _easier._ Instead of standing still, which literally made Krillen take the first step.

And, he realized as he landed, that first step was going to be a doozie, because the two of them looked terrible. Gohan was a soot-stained mess in what loosely looked like the clothes he'd disappeared in. And Piccolo wasn't standing right, was covered in what looked a lot like dried blood, was a duller green than Krillen had ever seen him.

"So, I must've missed some party, huh?" Krillen said.

Gohan blinked. Looked at Piccolo. "There was a party?" he asked, and it was so much like Goku suddenly that Krillen felt a weird contraction in his chest.

Piccolo's eyes narrowed in an unfriendly way. "So you did," he said to Krillen, ignoring Gohan completely. His voice was flat.

Krillen decided to shut up. His mouth didn't get the memo. "What the heck happened out here?" he asked.

Gohan looked at the ground, and his lower lip shook. Piccolo gave the boy a solid shake that rattled his teeth and said, "It doesn't matter. It's over now."

Krillen rocked back on his heels. Looked around again, and heard Piccolo growl when he did, so he stopped. "I need your help," he blurted at last. Looked up to see if he'd just committed suicide-by-Piccolo.

Piccolo laughed, low and rough in his chest like a car that doesn't run right. Gohan shifted nervously in his grip and gave Krillen a what-did-you-do look.

Krillen's face flushed. "Laugh if it makes you feel better," he said. "But I do need your help."

"This I gotta hear," Piccolo said. And he was grinning, leaning a little more on one leg than the other, but he was listening, too. "What do you think I'm gonna help you with."

"The dragonballs," Krillen said. "Two of them are…"

"Back at Camp Psycho. Yeah, I know."

"So if you know," Krillen said. "You know why I can't just go waltzing in there and find the darn things. That place is like a maze, and not to mention there are dem...," Krillen coughed, "other things you need to watch out for."

"I'm waiting for the part where this is my problem," Piccolo said.

And Krillen wanted to heave a rock at him all of a sudden. Because he did care about Goku, maybe even thought of him as a friend, if Piccolo understood the concept. Krillen saw it himself. Even if he hadn't seen it then, he could see it – or something like it – in the way he held Gohan, the way the boy was still clinging to him with his mud-coated fists. There was no reason for him to be so stubborn about it.

"You know what it's for," Krillen said.

Piccolo raised a browridge at him. "I know what you told me it was for," he said.

Krillen understood, suddenly, why Goku had so often seemed more stressed out than he used to be. Why he sometimes looked up at the sky and ground his teeth together for no reason.

"I saved your life," Krillen blurted.

Piccolo's whole expression changed like a sudden storm. "What," he said.

"Twice," Krillen said, and crossed his arms. Mainly because his hands were shaking, and that was the easiest way to hide them. "With the kienzan, and then with the giant monkey. So pony up already."

Piccolo opened his mouth. Closed it. Looked briefly confounded.

Gohan tugtugged at his uniform, or what was left of it. "Mr. Piccolo," he said, "I think he has a point, sir."

Piccolo gave Gohan a severe sideways glare that Krillen had only previously seen directed at Goku. The boy gulped and shut up.

"So what about it," Krillen said.

Piccolo's lips drew back slightly, revealing the too-shiny white of his teeth. It was almost, almost, a grin. "Come see me in a week," he said. "We'll talk about it."

"Wait, what?" Krillen said.

"Don't push it," Piccolo said. He turned on a heel – much, Krillen noticed, too slowly – and started to walk away. The small human wondered how much of an effort it was not to limp.

Then Krillen blinked as Gohan's head popped up over Piccolo's shoulder. The boy cupped his hands around his lips as if whispering a secret and mouthed "shh, that means yes."

So Krillen watched them go, dumbfounded in the middle of the desert. Realized Piccolo asked for a week because it would take him that long to heal. Realized he really was going to help them.

The monk tilted his head back at the nearly-white sky, grinned. "Looks like we'll be seeing ya soon after all, Goku," he said. And the wind rose up around him like a pair of cupped hands.


	9. Chapter 9

Chichi's arm was getting better. It wasn't okay yet – still in the sling, and it ached. The bone was up-and-down purple, the bruise following along the skin as if someone traced the path of her ulna with a permanent marker. She wiggled her fingers in between dishes. They tingled sometimes. She did not let herself think about what that might mean – nerve damage, swelling, not being able to feel her baby's hair when she touched it with those fingers.

Of course, it might be fine, too. With an injury like that, it was hard to tell.

Chichi pulled another dish out of the sink. If she rested her hip against it, she could brace it on the counter and scrub with her good hand. So far, she'd broken four dishes that way. She expected to break at least a few more.

Not that anyone was around to notice.

Chichi braced her good hand on the counter and leaned against it heavily for a moment or two. Her husband had been dead for she didn't know how long now. A few weeks, surely not more than a month. Her baby had been gone for almost that long. For the first time in her married life, the house was quiet, and she didn't need to start boiling rice first thing in the morning. She'd wished for that, guiltily, once or twice. Thought of the things she'd give for a day without cooking, thought about the things she'd do with five minutes to herself. The books she'd read, magazines she'd flip through, long baths she'd take, programs she'd watch on tv.

She finally had all the quiet she'd ever wanted. Books sat on the shelves, untouched. She felt numb in her baths, empty when she'd sit by herself on the couch. The television, at least, was on some of the time – but that was more background noise, something to fill up the quiet.

She wondered if the afterlife was this quiet. If her husband, wherever he was, was humming to himself, or if he was sleeping, or if he was just gone for as long as it took the dragonballs to…

But she couldn't think about that. About cold, empty dark, even if he wouldn't remember it.

She thought about Gohan, instead. Which, instead of making her want to faint, made her want to be sick.

What kind of mother was she? She'd lost him twice in as many days. The first time to her husband's older brother. The second to Piccolo, as she was composing her husband's body, no less.

The first time, that was bad enough. Her arm ached with the remembrance of how Raditz had closed his hand fully around her wrist, then turned his hand – just that, like he'd been turning the lid of a jar – and he'd flung her aside. Like she was nothing. Like she hadn't trained as a fighter from the time she could pick up a knife. Like she hadn't fought in tournaments, fought even her husband. Like she was any other house wife in the world, the ones she'd seen on the news sniffling after someone had ransacked her house or taken her children. The ones she'd quietly pitied and vowed never to be.

The second time was worse.

Krillen told her not to worry about it. This was, of course, after the two of them had combed the yard, hands cupped to their mouths as they called and called until the sky turned morning gray and the rain stopped. Until they both had to admit, to themselves and each other, that Gohan was gone.

"Piccolo won't hurt him," Krillen said. Like he was sure.

"How can you know that?" she'd asked. She'd been leaning on the counter then, too. "Why else would he take him away?"

Krillen had been very quiet. He'd stood in the middle of the kitchen, bloody, mud-covered, and tired. He had looked from her to her husband's body again and again – before the body had thinned and disappeared. (It was another thing, Chichi decided, that she was never going to forgive her husband for. Other wives at least had a body to look at long enough to make it real. Other wives didn't wake up every day for a week and think that maybe, at last, it wasn't true).

Finally, though, he said, "I know it's hard to believe, Chichi, but he _liked _Goku, in his own way." The monk scuffed his foot on the tile and added under his breath, "I think so, anyway."

"If he liked him so much," she said. "Why would he have let –"

"Chichi, look," Krillen said. "I don't know, okay? I know it's hard. But that thing, with Cymbal, Piccolo had to know it was a trap, he probably told Goku it was, but he came anyway. And he did the best he could. None of us woulda made it if it wasn't for him."

And Chichi tried to think about it that way. Tried to think of the times that she'd seen Piccolo when he hadn't been murdering someone, or trying to. And yes, that Goku had told her he was alright, that the two of them had left together from the house several times.

"That doesn't explain why he stole my son," she said.

"If I had to guess," Krillen said, "it's because he knows that Cymbal and the rest of them will want to kill Gohan while they've still got the chance. He might think it's the only way to keep him safe."

Which, of course, made her think about Cymbal. About the one and only time she'd really met him, how he'd tossed her aside easily, like Raditz, but if she had to categorize them, the big demon was somehow worse than her husband's alien brother. Because Raditz had been an animal, she'd seen that right away. He'd been direct, and passionate, and instinctual.

Not like Cymbal. Who, while he clearly loved his work, was, for lack of a better word, a professional. Who knew exactly what he was doing and how he was going to do it. And she understood a little better why Goku wouldn't talk about those years he'd spent fighting back and forth with the demons, no matter how many times she asked him about it. Why he still sometimes sat bolt upright in the middle of the night, hand fumbling for the bo he still kept beside his bed even years later.

The thought that a monster like that might want to hurt her child was the maternal equivalent to a kidney stone; her insides twisted for days at the thought of what someone like Cymbal could do to her little boy. She had, after all, seen what he did to Krillen. And Krillen was a fighter.

Which lead her to two unfortunate admissions. The first was that Piccolo might have been right to take Gohan. That he could protect the boy better than she would ever be able to.

That, more than anything, made her next decision for her.

_I'll do it,_ she thought. _Just as soon as my arm is better. I'll go talk to Roshi myself. I'll start training again. _

_And then I'll go give that big lummox a piece of my mind._

_

* * *

  
_

Cymbal was pleasantly unconscious for nearly an hour. And then they came to the steps.

There were three of them. They lead from the ground to the porch of a small cottage style house just off a small dirt road.

As he pieced it together later – it hurt much too much at the time – the woman had not been able to move him, or even attempt to move him, herself. Instead, she'd gone up the road, detached her donkey from the cart she took back and forth to town every day, and lead the shying, frightened little animal down to the side of the water.

She'd gotten some rope, made a liter out of a blanket she kept in the cart and a pair of boughs from the nearby pine trees. And then she and the donkey, by means of rope and more maneuvering than he frankly wanted to think about, managed to haul his saturated, still-bleeding body onto the liter.

It was an incredible feat, he would acknowledge later. How that small woman and a donkey between them had managed to haul him – Hell, he must have made three of her, at least – anywhere. He was missing an arm and most of a leg, which had to help some in terms of weight. Still, he was well over 300 pounds of lifeless even without those limbs.

But again, he'd figure that out later.

His thought waking up was actually that he might be on fire again.

Hot pain shot up his shoulders, the back of his neck, tingled in the severed stump of his left arm, the shattered bones in his torso. The black behind his eyes turned read; he actually screamed, clapped his still-present hand over his eyes, and tried to think far enough past "burn" and "ow" to make some kind of sound value judgment as to where he was, why he was on fire, and what his next move should be.

Clearly, "play dead" was no longer an option.

Slowly, he opened an eye, peered between his fingers.

The world was interestingly blurry. And both the woman and a mid-sized, fuzzy creature - donkey, he decided, or he was hallucinating again – were staring at him in something like abject horror.

The liter was tilted at a 45 degree angle. Halfway up, he realized, a set of steps. And he wasn't on fire. He just hurt very much.

"Jesus, lady," he said after a second or two. "There are easier ways to kill somebody."

The woman shot an uncertain look at the donkey. The little animal pinned its ears and stomped once. The blood smell was spooking it, and it wasn't sure how it felt about its load moving around and talking.

The woman said something encouraging. Put her hand on the donkey's harness.

"No, really," Cymbal said. "We're not doing that again." With an effort, he put his hand on the side of the liter, tried to sit up. Which hurt almost as much as going up the steps, but at least it was slower, instead of the sudden explosion.

The woman said something negative – probably telling him not to get up – and took a step toward him. He wasn't sure how he would have reacted to her efforts to get him to lie back down; whether he would have done it or snapped her fool neck. Fortunately or unfortunately, he never got to find out.

The litter shifted with his shift in weight, and one of the boughs snapped against a step with a sound like a gunshot. And of course the donkey, whose nerves were strained to the breaking point anyway, panicked. Which, for donkeys, meant that he kicked up his heels and, failing to hit either Cymbal or the liter, he fell back on the last resort for panicked donkeys. Which is to run away from the source of panic as quickly as possible.

The fuzzy thing ran squarely through the door as fast as he could go. And Cymbal, of course, went with him. The liter swayed slightly sideways and bounced off the door on the way through, and then they were in the living room, the donkey's hooves clattering like half a dozen pots and pans as he sprinted across the hardwood. The woman screamed, then yelled something one-syllable over and over – stop, maybe? – as the donkey dithered for a moment at a doorway, and finally careened into the kitchen, bouncing his forehead off the kitchen table, collapsing one of the legs. Fruit from a bowl skittered across the floor like scattered marbles. And there the donkey stopped, ears pinned, sides heaving. It let out a mournful bray and sat down.

Cymbal lay very still for a few seconds as he tried to process his situation. There were, he realized, grapes on his chest. And everything hurt very much. His head especially.

"Well played, burro," he said. He covered his eyes with his remaining hand to shield them from the kitchen light.

The woman was beside him then, stammering something over and over again. Cymbal didn't know the words, but he knew what it was. Apologies sound the same in every language. A few things do. Like, for instance, the sound of people begging for their lives. The tone, the posture – it never changes.

"Lady," he said, "it's fine. Just don't do me any more favors."

She was already up, though. Moving to touch the donkey's forehead, make soothing noises at it, no doubt convince it to drag him somewhere else.

Cymbal turned his head to the side, looked at where they'd come from. The overturned furniture, the smears of water and sand and blood. He noted wryly that he'd seen murders that made a lot less mess.

"If I survive this, you know," he said casually. Because he could say whatever the Hell he wanted, long as he kept his tone neutral, and she wouldn't know what he was saying. "I'm going to kill everyone. Seriously. Everybody."

She smiled at him blankly. Stroked the donkey's ears.

"My sire used to have an attack he suspected would destroy the whole planet."

She nodded, made a soothing sound. Tried to tug the now-recalcitrant donkey back out of the kitchen.

"Which would be handy," he added. "As there is literally nobody on this mudball that I do NOT hate right now."

The donkey consented to move. Stood up. Walked – with clear ire – back toward the living area.

Cymbal immediately noticed two or three things when they did, with much skidding and general moving of debris, make it back into the other room. Because he was, at heart, a soldier and used to keeping close watch on his surroundings. The first was a small cluster of photographs on the wall – a few years old, at least , he guessed. This woman and a young man. This woman and a baby. A small girl, maybe four, sitting on a bench with flowers and smiling uncertainly at what he guessed was the camera.

The second was the few scattered dolls lying on the floor, no doubt flung helter skelter by the donkey's one-equine stampede.

The third was a little girl, maybe five or six, standing at the foot of the staircase in what Cymbal loosely recognized as some sort of sports uniform. Her slick black hair was in pigtails, and her jaw was dropped in a clear attitude of shock.

"Seven hells, I've been captured by a soccer mom," he said.

And then, he couldn't help it, he laughed. Out loud. The back of his hand pressed to his forehead as he laughed so hard that blood, previously pooling in his lungs and throat, trickled from the side of his mouth.

The last thing he saw clearly before he lost consciousness again (thank any gods listening) was a pair of concerned, eerily similar faces peering down at him.

* * *

Piccolo had said a week. This, Krillen knew, meant a week. Piccolo wasn't like a banking service or Fed Ex. You couldn't get him to deliver faster by harassing him.

Still, three days later, he was there again. Hands in his pockets. Wondering what the Hell was wrong with him.

Piccolo and Gohan were nowhere in sight. Not that Krillen even knew exactly that they were there . He'd just gone out to where they'd been, and he'd raised his chi enough that Piccolo would be able to find him easily. If he wanted to.

So Krillen stood still and waited. It wasn't that he expected Piccolo to come find him, exactly. It was just that, at the moment, he didn't have anything better to do. And that he knew, he'd been able to tell from the strained slowness of the other's movements, that Piccolo was still badly hurt from whatever fight he'd had with his family.

Not that even a badly-injured Piccolo was all that likely to need HIS help of all things. But he couldn't stop thinking about it. So there he was. In the middle of the freaking desert. Just waiting for…

"Hn. Can't you tell time?"

Krillen jumped a solid three feet in the air, spun halfway around, and almost turned an ankle due to sand being shifty.

And of course, there was Piccolo. Standing, sans cape and turban, just out from a few rocks. Arms crossed, chin down, looking generally like he was going to kick someone's ass.

Probably mine, Krillen thought fatalistically.

Out loud, he said, "It's eleven thirty."

Piccolo raised an eyeridge. And, flatly, "What the Hell are you doing here."

Krillen had all kinds of things planned out in his head that he would say when Piccolo asked him something like that. But at that moment, he couldn't remember a one of them. He put his hand behind his head, laughed nervously, and said, "Well, y'know, I just happened to be in the neighborhood, and…"

Piccolo's eyes narrowed.

"…and I thought, well, I guess I didn't think this through so well, but I…"

He started to growl, just low at first, like it was coming from way far off.

"…thought I'd see how you were doing."

Piccolo went completely silent. Actually looked at him a little wide-eyed.

"After the fight and everything."

More silence.

Krillen grinned a very nervous grin. "So, uh, you're fine, and I'll be going now."

Piccolo shook his head hard, like he was trying to shake something out of it. "Were you dropped on your head when you were a kid, too?"

"Uh…not that I know of," Krillen said. He took a step backward. "Sorry to bother you. I guess I'll see you…"

Piccolo huffed. "Not so fast."

Krillen stopped, one foot still in the air.

"If you're here, you can make yourself useful." Piccolo looked away from him – the first time so far that conversation he hadn't had him pinned in a stare – and said, to some nearby rocks, "Well, come on."

Gohan stepped out from the shadows, looking shy and happy and a heck of a lot better than he had two days ago. Even if the little bit of "scared" in his eyes hadn't gone away just yet. The boy looked straight at Krillen, grinned in a way that looked a lot more like Chichi than like Son, and bowed at him.

"If you're going to be underfoot," Piccolo said, "you can at least teach the brat something about energy manipulation."

"You mean teach him chi blasts," Krillen said.

Gohan blanched visibly.

Piccolo shook his head. "Just light for now. Maybe how to power up without frying himself."

Gohan took a step back. Looked over at Piccolo with giant eyes.

"It's that, or the next time you get ticked, you'll make a whole lot of glass again," Piccolo said, no trace of sympathy in his tone whatsoever.

The boy took a deep breath that puffed him up like one of the tiny sand birds on Master Roshi's island. He nodded. "Yes, sir."

"Wait," Krillen said. "What?"

Piccolo smirked. "See what you get for being a pest?" he said. Turned on a heel, and started to walk away. "I'll be back in a couple of hours. Try not to die."

Which meant, Krillen realized, that he was going to go pass out for a while, because someone else was keeping an eye on Gohan. He opened his mouth. Closed it. Kicked sand with his foot.

"YOU'RE WELCOME!" he finally bellowed at the demon's retreating back.

Piccolo very obviously pretended not to hear him. Which, Krillen decided, was pretty much par for the course.


	10. Chapter 10

The spot Piccolo chose was a hole of sorts in the side of a bluff. Scrub grass and stunted shrubs covered most of the mouth, and the hole was shallow – enough for him to sit in, with his back propped against the wall, and enough that he could stretch his legs out, but no more than that.

Still, even in the mid-morning sun, it was almost cool, and it had a good view of the ravine where Krillen had been struggling to teach Gohan energy manipulation. They were wavery at this distance, the size of his thumb, barely visible. He should have been closer.

Should have been, but wasn't.

Piccolo closed his eyes for a moment, drained – was it really so hot out there, he wondered, or was he still worn down from the fight a few days ago? – and tried not to chide himself mentally for his carelessness in leaving his charge with a stunted human.

Alright, so that wasn't fair. Krillen was an exceptional (if still stunted) human.

He also didn't seem to be having any better luck with chi manipulation than Piccolo had. He could see that clear enough from where he was…Krillen, animated, would all but dance around in circles, making expansive, round gestures with his hands, then crouching and pantomiming the way that most people focus and gather their power. It looked more like interpretive dance than martial arts instruction, and it was a degree of idiocy that Piccolo would never have been able to attempt himself.

Gohan, he could tell, was watching this display intently, wide eyed, like Piccolo imagined other children watched television. He even mimicked a few of the gestures, shy and small. But each time Krillen opened his hands to him – an invitation to try it – the boy shook his head, probably biting his lip in that damneable way of his, and Krillen slumped each time, visibly.

Piccolo could sympathize. Just watching it was exhausting.

He let his head thunk back against the cool sandstone and tried not to think about how much they might need this to work. How, if what Kami had said to him had been real and not some pain-induced hallucination, they had more Saiyans to fight, and how Gohan might just possibly be the only one among them strong enough to be of any help.

Krillen flared briefly with light, and Gohan hid behind a shrub. The monk stood baffled – Piccolo couldn't see the face, exactly, but he could see it in the sudden fall-forward of the head.

Piccolo could easily imagine the sigh.

At least it meant that Krillen didn't have any more idea than Piccolo how to overcome Gohan's fear of his own energy.

Piccolo suspected that the problem was the same. Deep down, Gohan trusted both of them (perhaps, he thought, unwisely). Krillen would never put the boy in danger to start with. And he, when he did, failed just as surely because Gohan believed so strongly that he would never let anything happen to him.

They were both, Piccolo realized, too nice. Which, in Krillen's case, probably couldn't be helped, but *he* should have known better.

He closed his eyes again. It was nice, so easy not to think.

_I was never like that_, he thought for maybe the hundred and fifty third time since meeting Son Gohan. _I was never so damned trusting. _

Then again, he'd had no reason to believe that Cymbal would NOT cheerfully let him bounce off the rocks when he dropped him for HIS first flying lesson. Hell, the big bastard might have made a few choice jokes about his inadequacy while he was falling. And he'd certainly never failed to block a punch out of some misguided assumption that Cymbal wouldn't hit him. Or knee him, or kick him, swipe him with his claws, send him rolling with a well-placed energy blast. Probably because every time Piccolo dropped his hands - even if it was because his vision was swimming brown or because his arm, from one shot or another, had gone numb – Cymbal _did_ hit him. Hard. Harder than Son Goku hit him before the monkey figured out exactly what he could take.

He winced internally at the thought of employing those methods with Gohan. How many times would he have to actually hit him – actually DROP him – before the boy believed him? And would he survive the lessons long enough for them to work? Because while Piccolo knew what was inside that boy, he wasn't so sure about the outside. Its durability. Its resilience.

Or maybe the boy would never believe it, no matter how many times it happened. Just as Son Goku had so staunchly believed, no matter how many times Piccolo broke his knuckles on the man's face, that he "wasn't so bad."

_Stupid monkey_, he thought. _Stupid, stupid, stupid, so strong you don't have to worry about anything, aren't you? No, you can just run around rescuing demons and kids and whatever else strikes your fancy and nobody ever gets hurt because you're so strong. And you were so damned sure I had your back that you dropped your guard like…_

But his mind closed off that path before he had time to finish it. And instead, he found himself thinking again about the desert, about his first three years of life. He tried to imagine Gohan taking that kind of punishment and couldn't. The boy would simply curl up in a ball and _die_, probably whining all the while about math tests and how much he missed his mother_._

It was hard enough to imagine for himself. A blur, more than a memory, a smear in the back of his head of air so think he almost couldn't breathe it, sand grinding itself into the cuts in his hands, the salty taste in his mouth after a bad shot to the gut.

_You realize he'll hate you for this, _he remembered. Tambourine had said it one hazy afternoon when Piano and Drum had already called it a day and gone home, when Piccolo lay on the sharp scree at the bottom of a cliff face, his vision sometimes clear, sometimes full of rust. Cymbal stood beside him in the sand, his hands stained purple up to the wrists.

_He can hate me all he wants, _Cymbal had said carelessly. _Hell, the more the better. _

But now that he was really thinking about it, the person who'd stood with him the most often afterward – the pair of boots he most often saw when he finally opened his eyes again – were Cymbal's.

Piccolo had always thought that he waited just to grind his face in the sand one more time before he took off. Or to see if he really HAD killed him this time. But he supposed he could have been keeping the vultures away. He just didn't know.

A distant hum told him that someone – Krillen, he knew, though he didn't open his eyes to check – had fired a chi blast. He put his hand over his eyes, and for a moment, he envied humans their tear ducts. Not because he wanted to be able to shed tears, so much as because he wanted to know if he wanted to.

* * *

Son groaned out loud when he opened his eyes. His head felt like it had been used to break down a few doors the night before, and the air in the room felt heavy on his chest and face. He put a hand carefully over his eyes – the middle of his nose hurt from the light – and tried to let his vision filter back slowly. His eyeballs felt too full; painful, too much pressure.

He wondered briefly if he HAD been opening doors with his head again.

But no. He was in bed, a rich person's bed, someone who liked a lot of bright colors. He sat up slowly – a wash of dizziness took him, so he had to try twice. Then he trailed his hand over the sheet, cool to the touch, and looked around subtly to see if he'd broken anything yet.

The floor was some kind of marble; there were pillars, cloth-paintings on the wall, and it occurred to Son Goku that wherever he was, he definitely didn't belong there. Heck, he felt awkward enough in the house with Chichi sometimes; even the simple surfaces, the kitchen utensils, they felt awkward in his hands, like trying to write left-handed when you're a rightie, and he always felt like he was going to rip the handles off the drawers. A place as, well, fancy as this – especially after he'd spent most of his life in the woods – it was like being in a glass house.

He wondered if he'd tripped and fallen into Hell again. Only as far as he remembered, Hell didn't have tapestries. Just funny trees and ogres and lava fountains.

Goku put his hand to his forehead, narrowed his eyes, tried to think. "No," he said out loud, "that's not right." He'd been running – forever, felt like – then something had happened next. He'd seen a building, and the building was full of strange women with scaly clothes and blue skin, and he'd thought one of them was King Kai.

She wasn't, though. She was Princess Snake, and this was her house. She'd been nice enough even after he judo-threw her at the ground; she'd offered him dinner. He could remember there was tea, a whole table full of things he couldn't really name, and then after that…

…after that, nothing.

Son swung his legs out of bed and wondered briefly at his lack of clothes. Had he pulled a Roshi and left them somewhere? No – they were folded on a chair beside the bed, perfect creases like he never did when he folded clothes.

Which didn't exactly mean he hadn't pulled a Roshi. When the old turtle hermit got drunk – which happened more than most of his students were exactly comfortable with – he would sometimes go running down the beach, leaving a shoe here, a pair of shorts there…

Had he been drinking, though? He didn't think so.

Did he take them off himself? He didn't know.

Goku felt his face heat up and, as he often did when faced with this kind of thing, decided promptly that he was done thinking about it. In fact, it might be a good idea never to think about it again.

All he had to think about now was how to get out of this mess – as the girls sure put up a fight when he tried to leave. Beginning to dress – he still felt weirdly muzzy, and his fingers were having a hard time with ties – he started wondering about the best course of action. He'd never really had to plan an escape before , or at least, when he had, it'd been escapes he understood. Take off through the trees, try not to look back. Fly into the direction of the snow; that way, whoever's following you can't see very good. Sure, that kind of thing he understood. But escaping nice women who kept shoving drinks at him? What was he supposed to do?

He couldn't tie his belt right. With a sigh, he jerked an awkward, lopsided knot in the damned thing and fell back on the bed wrong-ways, arms spread out to the side. "Okay," he said. "Think. What would Chichi tell me to do."

Goku thought about that for a moment – about what Chichi would think of this mess – and winced. "She'd kill me, that's what," he said. Which he probably deserved for getting himself captured by a beauty pageant girl, but didn't help him get out of there, beings as he was already dead.

Krillen?

Goku sighed. "Faint, probably," he admitted to the ceiling. "And then propose to like three of them, and get discouraged, and wonder what I would do if I were there." And that line of thinking, he decided, was making his headache worse.

Yamcha?

…Goku dragged both hands down his face. "He'd live here," he said. "He'd ask for a room and live here forever, and Bulma would never, ever stop yelling at him."

What Roshi would do, Goku decided, wasn't even worth considering. Unless he decided to get thrown out as a last resort.

Which pretty much left him with trying to decide what Piccolo would do in this situation. At least _that _was easy to do. Piccolo would never have gotten himself into a mess like this in the first place. He would have taken one look at this palace type thing and said "Son, if you think I'm setting foot near that thing, you're brain dead," and he would have kept right on running. Might even have snagged him by the back of the gi and hauled him along if he didn't keep up. And definitely would have grumbled for half an hour about how he doesn't know how he managed to survive so long without adult supervision.

Goku sighed. "Just lucky, I guess," he said.

Okay. So if Piccolo had maybe taken leave of his senses, or hit his head recently, or was (for some reason) following him temporarily and landed in a mess like this, what would he do?

"He'd sit up. He'd get dressed. He'd smack me a good one upside the head for getting him into another mess. And then he'd forget all about being polite and either blow a hole in the wall or run like crazy."

Son chuckled, and sat up. Then, he smacked himself a fair one on the back of the head and said, "Okay. Run like crazy it is."

* * *

Regrowing the limbs had been painful. Cymbal couldn't remember much about it when he finally returned to consciousness for good, but he remembered that it hurt like Hell. He could even sort of remember thrashing around on the bed that damned woman had eventually managed to harass him into climbing into, as there was frankly no way in Hell either she or the donkey was getting him into it otherwise.

So he'd hauled himself up on the fresh, white sheets, and he'd bled and convulsed like he was having a seizure. He'd screamed wordlessly – wordless only because he hadn't had the presence of mind to form profanity – as fresh limbs shot out along his left side.

Then, of course, he'd passed out again.

When he woke up, much to his irritation, his ankle was actually tied to the footboard of the bed, apparently with a belt pillaged off a godsdamned rain coat. Pretty much like an assylum patient, which he figured made sense, as it already felt like he was _losing his damned mind. _

Cymbal growled to himself and started to sit up – only to have a tray crack against his sternum. He blinked. On it was a cup of tea, a plate of some kind of cracker, and a little container of green jello.

The demon blinked. He followed the tray with his eyes to the hand that held it, and followed the hand to the arm, and the arm to the shoulder, and the shoulder to the face of the very stern-looking soccer-mom-librarian-lady who had "rescued" him.

Cymbal looked down at the tray, then at her. He put two fingers against it and slooowly pushed it away. "No," he said, "sorry, not interested."

He started to sit up again. She put a hand on his shoulder, looking down at him with clear concern, babbling in that damned broken-up language he didn't understand.

Cymbal tried, briefly, to push through her hand, but his new arm – which he hadn't properly broken in yet – gave out under his weight and he found himself right back on his back again.

Okay, so maybe he wasn't ready to get up yet anyway.

The woman very gently put the tray back in his lap, and Cymbal dragged a hand down his face. He entertained a brief, satisfying visual of taking the tray away from her and beating her to death with it. "I'm not an invalid, lady," he said. Which wasn't _exactly_ true, but he wasn't all that concerned with the truth.

But the woman took no notice of his scowl, his wild gestures, OR his tone. She was already chattering at him pleasantly about who-knew-what, bringing a pillow or two over so that he could sit up. And then she held up a calendar with a day circled.

That day was two weeks in the future.

She smiled, pointed at it, pointed at him. Then she pantomimed a walking motion.

"…two weeks," Cymbal said. He held up his right hand, raised two fingers.

The woman nodded and grinned.

"Right here," he said. He pointed at the bed.

She clapped her hands together and nodded again, clearly thrilled to be communicating with the alien thingy.

"What the HELL am I supposed to do for two weeks!?" Cymbal erupted. "Twiddle my thumbs? Knit a damned blanket? You're out of your mind!"

The woman blinked several times and took a step back. Then, seeming to realize what he was ranting about, she held up a finger as if to say wait.

Cymbal, curiousity be damned, waited.

The woman winked. Walked over to a small television set that had been balanced precariously on a dresser. And turned it on.

Cymbal stared in utter disbelief as a man and a woman on a screen shouted at each other over organ music. No. It couldn't be.

It was.

"You want me to lie here for two weeks and watch soap operas," he said. Even to his own ears, he sounded completely defeated.

The woman patted him on the head, set the tray back in his lap, and stirred his tea for him. Then she left.

And he couldn't reach the damned knob on the television…and probably couldn't blast it, either. The man and woman had gone from screaming at each other to holding on to each other and sobbing. The organ music shifted to "sad" and, if he'd had enough energy at that moment, Cymbal was pretty damn sure he would have flown straight to Hollywood or Bollywood or wherever-the-Hell-was-responsible-for-this-shit and strangled the bejezus out of an organist. And probably, he would have strafed a Starbucks or two out of spite – that's where producers hang out, isn't it?

Cymbal groaned out loud and slumped back against the bed, bringing a hand up to rub over the aching bridge of his nose. "At least it can't get worse," he said. "No matter what else happens to me, it can't ever get worse."

He felt a depression on the side of the bed. "Don't you ever go to work or…" but wait, that was too light even for the woman. He peered through his fingers.

The little girl was sitting on the side of the bed. She had a book balanced in her lap that was nearly as big as she was.

Cymbal eyed her with some alarm, still peering between fingers. "What are you doing here," he asked.

The girl grinned, and opened her book. It was full of small, colorful cards decorated with cartoon animals. She pointed to the first one and started chattering at him excitedly. The very first one was a greenish lizard sort of thing that appeared to be scowling.

Cymbal wondered if he had enough dignity left that yelling for help would actually damage it.

* * *

Master Roshi heard the air car coming from a long way off. He picked up his cane (not that he really needed it) strapped his turtle shell to his back (not that it really helped much anymore) and opened his door, fully prepared to meet either a solicitor or an evangelist, as those were pretty much the only people who ever made it out as far as the Kame house.

Instead, he saw a woman – a pretty one, long black hair, a purple dress – hopping out of a battered air car. One of her arms was in a sling. The other was clenched in a fist by her side as she stormed up the beach like she was scaling Normandy.

Roshi squinted through his sunglasses. He'd been meaning to greet her with something like a "Hey there, pretty lady," but she looked familiar. Very familiar. And although he hadn't seen her in something like five years… "Hey there," he said, "Aren't you Goku's girl? What're you doing all the way out here."

Chichi stopped walking. She planted her feet shoulder width apart like a soldier and said, "You're going to be my teacher, Kamesennin."

Roshi blinked. "Excuse me?" he said.

"You're going to be my teacher."

"No, I heard you," he said. "And in the first place, young lady, I don't think you're striking the proper tone, and in the second place, I can't be your teacher anyway, so you might as well go home."

Chichi crossed her good arm and scowled at him. "Why not," she said.

"I've never had a female student before," he said. "It's just not done."

"Well," she said, "then I'll be the first."

Roshi rocked back on his sandalled heels. "I thought you didn't want your boy or your husband fighting."

"I don't," she said. "But if they're GOING to do it anyway, then I'm going with them."

And Roshi looked at her still-purpled face, the particular break on her forearm, and sighed heavily. He could see that no matter what he said, she wasn't going anywhere. "Fine," he said, and he wondered when exactly he'd started to sound like a tired old man. "Let's see you run around the world four times. Then we'll talk."

He turned his back on his shocked expression and shuffled back toward the door. "Turtle! Oolong! Get the spare room ready – we got company!"


	11. Chapter 11

Zarbon hit "enter" key for the fifth time and watched the "wait" bar fill up again.

He didn't expect the results to be any different from the other four times. But when you're going to tell Lord Frieza something that he doesn't want to hear, you had better be damned sure that it's at least accurate.

The numbers scrolled, reflected on his face like a map. He drummed his fingers on the console, face a careful blank – though he noticed that the techies had been moving farther and farther away from him with each press of the "enter" key.

The screen smoothed into a map of local star systems. Four dots. One on a small, previously insignificant planet somewhere in the west galaxy. Two close together, moving that way. One more coming up from the south. All Saiyan. None of which had been responding to radio contact for at least two months.

"Damn," Zarbon said without inflection.

Not that any of them were that dangerous, really. Not even the little prince who'd started the entire wretched populace talking about the next Super Saiyan. There had been, as far as Zarbon was concerned, only one VERY dangerous Saiyan, and he had died around twenty years ago on the wrong end of one of Lord Frieza's fits of pique. What was his name, Barack…Bardock. Something like that. A nobody third-class who had somehow or other become strong enough to survive a point-blank blast from Dodoria. Who had, if Zarbon's scouter had not been malfunctioning (and it never was, as he was one of the few soldiers in Frieza's army with enough gods-given sense to get the thing serviced on a regular basis – what part of every six months or 6,000 clicks was so _bloody _hard to fathom, anyway?), flickered at the very end at a power level that would put him above half the Ginyu force.

A nobody third-class. Imagine.

That was very possibly why there were no more third class Saiyans – nobodys or otherwise. Just four. Raditz, who had been a Saiyan of first class or so; Zarbon could faintly recall him in that he'd seemed more savage from the rest, a step above a natural predator, but not much beyond that. He mostly remembered the way the large warrior had had of pulling his lips back and grinning in a way that was almost a snarl – which he did a lot in Frieza's presence, more in his. Zarbon had wondered on more than one occasion if the big Saiyan had been trying to decide what he would taste like.

Well, he thought, pity he never decided to find out. That was one of the downsides of being Frieza's personal ataché – it was one of the most frustrating and dangerous jobs in the empire and, paradoxically, the one in which you were LEAST likely to ever get to hit anything again.

Then there was Turles, the other first class that was drifting about somewhere in the south – unlike most Saiyans, he had a head for subtlety. He wasn't one of Frieza's soldiers; he worked for lord Cooler instead. As far as Zarbon knew, he'd been running around the south galaxy with a small retinue of fighters weeding out anything that the older icejinn thought needed weeding. It struck Zarbon as dangerous, of course – wasn't that how Bardock had happened? - but what Cooler wanted to do with his galaxy was his business. Zarbon just hoped he had a decent insurance plan and quietly thanked whatever gods were listening that, when the shit inevitably hit the fan, he was at least going to be spared the paperwork.

Then there was Nappa – a brute of a Saiyan that exemplified everything that Zarbon found obnoxious about the race. Powerful enough that he didn't need technique, powerful enough that he didn't want it, either. Not in Zarbon's league, of course, but there was something about him that made him nervous all the same. Perhaps it was the temper, he thought. That kind of rage made people stupid, but it also made them unpredictable. And Zarbon had no use for unpredictable things, be they computers or giant, bald-headed Saiyans.

Then of course there was the little prince with the unusually high power level (who should have died with his damned planet as far as Zarbon was concerned, but there was no reasoning with Frieza when he found something entertaining). To Zarbon's understanding, he'd been what had gotten the whole savage populace babbling about the next Super Saiyan in the first place. Not that Zarbon had ever put much stock in THOSE rumors – one of those half-wild monkeys could never handle so much power. Hell, even he, who had his emotions fully under control, needed a lower energy form and a higher energy form in order to keep from vaporizing ships or crushing tea cups. And don't get him STARTED on how hard it was to avoid snapping hair-ties.

But then there had been Bardock, and Zarbon had started, for the first time, to wonder.

Zarbon stared at the screen for another minute or two and willed it to change. Willed it to go white with a flashing "error" message. Willed it to explode.

No. Two dots up north. One to the south. One on panet 36-11-3. Chikyuu. Earth, he thought the natives called it in their radio broadcasts. But that one had been very still for a very long time.

Zarbon sighed and hit "print."

* * *

Krillen was beginning to really WORRY about Piccolo.

The big demon – Namekian, he corrected himself – was, to borrow one of Yamcha's words, _pissed._

"If you DON'T defend yourself, I'm GOING to kill you!" Piccolo literally bellowed at the boy at the top of his lungs – it was a sight to see. The normally-composed warrior was all but waving his arms in sheer frustration, drawn up like one of those birds that puffs around intruders. "What about that is so damned HARD to UNDERSTAND!"

Gohan qualed in the face of his mentor's rage, putting both hands up in front of his face as if to deflect a blow which, Krillen thought dismally, wasn't completely outside the realm of the possible. His lower lip started to quiver.

"Don't. You. Dare." Piccolo said severely.

"Sorry, sir," Gohan said miserably.

Krillen would not, a month ago, have been willing to say anything about it. Like, for example, that alternating between beating on the kid and screaming at him might not be doing such great things for Gohan's development. But he'd been watching the other warrior carefully all this time and, much to his surprise, was beginning to think that Piccolo might not actually WANT to kill Gohan after all. "Aw, Piccolo,' he said before he thought better of it.

Piccolo rounded on him with alarming speed – kind of like a snake when you poke it – and it occurred to Krillen that while even Piccolo might have some compunctions at all about battering a defenseless kid, HE was another story. "Don't you "aw Piccolo" me," he snapped, "we don't have TIME for this!"

Krillen hastily put up both hands, but didn't shut up, which was a concept he decided he was going to work on immediately if he lived long enough. "It's not really his fault! I mean, he did nearly kill you like a month ago, and three people besides – it's a LOT for a little kid."

Piccolo's eyes narrowed further. He seemed to be thinking. Though whether he was weighing the weight of Krillen's words or trying to decide how far he could punt him, Krillen wasn't sure.

Then, Piccolo grinned. "You're absolutely right," he said.

Krillen blinked. "I am?"

Piccolo grinned more. Krillen could see teeth. "You are."

Still grinning – he'd NEVER looked so cheerful, Krillen thought with some alarm – Piccolo turned back to Gohan. "Alright, kid," he said. "New plan."

Gohan looked up hopefully from between his fingers.

Piccolo said, "I'm not going to hit you anymore."

Gohan perked. "Really?"

"Really."

It was too good to be true, Krillen decided. Piccolo wasn't the give-up type.

Even Gohan, it seemed, had his suspicions. "What are we gonna do instead?" he asked warily, looking at Piccolo the same way that most people look at street magicians.

Piccolo was positively _beaming._ "From now on," he said. "I'm going to hit _him._" He pointed straight at Krillen.

Krillen's eyes briefly crossed as he found a very sharp finger pointing square at his nonexistent nose. Then the words sank in."Hey!" Krillen exclaimed.

Gohan blinked. "What?" The boy looked as startled as Krillen felt.

"Are you out of your mind? I can't fight with you!" Krillen all but blabbered. "You almost killed me LAST time and there were RULES AGAINST IT!i"

Piccolo winked at him. Yes. Winked. "That's a shame," he said, even as he threw his weighted clothing aside. "Guess it's been nice knowing you."

Oh, Krillen thought. I get it. Piccolo thinks that Gohan will use that energy if I'm in trouble. Which means that the only way to save the world…

…is for me to get my ass kicked. "This is such _bullshit_," he said more adamantly than he meant to with Gohan around.

"Think of it more as 'taking one for the team'" Piccolo advised as he rolled his neck to either side, loosening the vertebrae. And, Krillen thought grimly, he's enjoying this WAY too much.

"If it's so important," he grumbled at Piccolo as the other launched at him talons-first (causing Krillen to duck and scramble for his life), "how about you let me beat on you, huh?"

Piccolo just smirked more. "How about you try," he suggested.

* * *

Piccolo opened his eyes and found himself staring squarely into the desert sun. Blinded and annoyed, he put his hand over his face and tried to decide what in Hell made him take a nap on burning sand in the middle of the day.

"Holy freaking cow" Krillen said somewhere a way off in the distance. Wherever he was, there was also a high-pitched, irritating ringing. Piccolo made a mental note to stop that as soon as possible.

Piccolo sat up.

Krillen, roughly fifty yards away, also sat up.

Gohan, of course, was crying again.

It was time to backtrack, Piccolo thought. Let's see. I was beating the bejeezus out of the little monk over there – check. Lots of acrobatic escapes and oh-geeze-I'm-gonna-die's and but-I-never-even-got-a-girlfriend whining – check. Gohan yelling stop it at the top of his lungs. Also check. Bright light squarely between him and Krillen knocking them both in opposite directions.

Oooooooh. "Gentlemen," Piccolo said with more cheer than anyone who had nearly died by his student's hand (again) had any right to show, "we have found our solution."

Krillen flopped right back onto the sand. "Whoopie," he said, deadpan.

Piccolo decided on the spot that he might actually be starting to LIKE the little freak. But, he consoled himself, that's probably the concussion talking.

* * *

_*author's note – this is a dream sequence. _

_The sky had been red for almost a week. Not sunset red or sunrise red – dark clouds stretched from horizon to horizon, the undersides lit up with distant fires, pulsing and dancing like smoke from a billows. Cymbal caught himself glancing up at it more and more as the days stretched on, wondering if it was ever going to rain again. _

_He was standing on a small hill, trying not to inhale. Down below, the lesser demons – goblin-like creatures with webbing between their fingers and bulging fish eyes – were herding the humans that had once lived in the now-burning village into a large pen in what Cymbal supposed had once been a rice paddy. They were scruffy and hunched, these humans, knee-deep in water, just masses of blankets with bundles, stumbling toward the open gate. He didn't expect any trouble from __**them**__. They were broken people, their warriors (if he was feeling nice enough to call them that) were collecting flies among the burning huts, and he seriously doubted any earth military would know about this until it was already much too late. They'd be off to another village by then, stamping out humanity one village, then one city, then one country at a time. _

_Not that the military was worth a bucket of warm spit anyway. Big, slow machines with big, slow bullets. _

_Cymbal tipped his head back all the same, habitually scanning the sky for planes. But of course, there was nothing. He figured they'd have to run out of the damned things soon, anyway. _

"_What do you think, T," he said, consciously keeping his voice around 'bored.' Because even though he wasn't looking, he knew his brother was behind him, no doubt watching the scene below. Probably counting how many damned humans they were killing by the hour, weighing that against how many were left, how long the whole enterprise would take. Tanbarin had a fascination with mathematic projection that Cymbal had asked him to explain exactly once. The resulting headache had lasted for three days. He had simply pronounced his brother "fucked in the head" and never thought about it much again. _

"_That this is a waste of a perfectly good set of trees," Tanbarin said, in reference to the pen. _

_Cymbal snorted. "You know that and I know that," he said. _

_Tanbarin wasn't standing next to him. He was down a bit below, standing up against the hill so that he wouldn't leave a silhouette – wouldn't be so easy to pick out from the small foothills, the far-off rocks. Cymbal figured he, in contrast, made quite the target…a large figure, clearly a ranking demon, standing out like a sore thumb against a burning village. Which was part of the plan. _

"_Where are they, T," he said – he kept his voice very soft. _

_Tanbarin did not ask who he meant. "You always expect me to know," he said. He sounded borderline annoyed. _

_Cymbal snorted. Partially in contempt, partially to clear his nostrils of the scents of fear, urine, smoke. "Thought you were the big-shot telepath." _

"_I thought you didn't believe in that…what did you call it…touchy-feely new-age bullshit." _

_Cymbal chanced a glance over at his brother. The man – boy, he figured, technically, as he was all of six months old, but he was too…something…to be a boy- was standing quietly, arms crossed, expression a study in blankness. _

"_Stop being so damned difficult," he said. "Where are they." _

_T shrugged again. "Too much interference," he said. He cast an annoyed look at the no-doubt-frantic pen of human beings. Some of the more enterprising creatures were patting at the firm slats of the fence. _

"_Bullshit," Cymbal said. _

_Tanbarin shifted his too-pale eyes just enough to peer up at him. He smirked, just faintly. "North by northwest," he said, "Approaching. Only two." _

_That would be Son Goku the monkey boy and the old turtle master, Cymbal suspected. "Give me an ETA," he said. _

"_Fifteen minutes." _

_Down below, the lesser demons were pulling one of the humans out of the pen. If Cymbal squinted, he could see that it was a woman – he thought, anyway, she was too swaddled in cloth to REALLY tell, but the legs he saw occasionally as she kicked and writhed and tried to run were certainly more female than male. _

_She had a bundle of something in her arms. Probably some useless trinkets she'd thrown in a pillow case before the demons had herded her out of her home, dragged her by her skirts, sleeves, or wrists through the dusty, smoke-filled streets. She was screaming something in a language he didn't understand – but then, he didn't need to. "Help, someone, please." Maybe names that she thought would useful. Mother. Father. A husband who was probably already dead. _

_Of course, no one could help her now. The lesser demons were already licking their uneven, jagged teeth. They were hungry, in a foul mood from actual work – they were bored. And, Cymbal knew, they were going to rip that woman into tiny little pieces. _

_Normally, of course, he would have vaporized the whole pen in one go and been done with it. There were too many humans on this mudball to go picking the little bastards off one at a time. _

_But then, there were other things to consider. Like that his sire, Lord Daimao no Pikoro, wanted a strangely-powerful little human with a monkey tail brought to him alive or dead immediately. That this gawky little kid – barely a teenager, just now growing into his damned LEGS for the gods' sakes – could somehow fight any of them and live, much less HURT them was an affront to him. Worse, the boy was still growing. Was stronger every time they fought him. _

_Not that it was a crisis by any means – not yet. But Daimao no Pikoro didn't get to be the demon king by taking stupid chances. He wanted that scrawny little brat put out of his misery before he grew into a REAL problem, and he'd appointed Cymbal to do it for him. _

_That had been easier said than done. Son Goku knew that he was no match for him. He'd learned that the hard way. They boy never stood and fought with him for long for that reason. He was, Cymbal admitted to himself, damneably annoying. He would pop up out of nowhere, attack him. He'd distract him long enough for his little friends to play hero and save a small group of worthless, simpering survivors – and then he'd break and run through the trees or the foothills. Press his chi down to nothing. Run so that you couldn't see him from the air and would have to follow on foot. _

_Cymbal had learned quickly not to follow the monkey boy when he ran. He'd instructed the lesser demons not to do so as well. He'd learned that they would run far ahead, set ambushes. Learned that even desert bandits, deformed assassins, and blue-haired sluts can be dangerous when you don't see them until they're on top of you. Tanbarin's predecessor, a lanky demon whose name Cymbal couldn't remember, had died that way on the second day of his life. Cymbal had nearly gone with him. _

_You could say what you wanted about him – Cymbal didn't ever make the same mistake twice. He'd decided instead to make his quarry come to him. It was a pathetically easy thing to do. You just get enough humans together and let the demons take them apart one at a time. Because, while the boy seemed to understand that he needed to survive long enough to become a real threat, he seemed to have a real problem watching that kind of thing for very long without interfering. _

_Of course, there was always the question of how many humans they'd have to go through before monkey-boy broke cover and took a shot at one of them – probably Cymbal, as he was making such an effort to be a target. And of course, no matter what, Son Goku wasn't going to arrive in time to save this human. The demons were already ripping at her – she was curling in on herself around her bundle. Candlesticks, probably – candlesticks and silverware and some old jewelry. It was always that. Cymbal made a quiet bet with himself as to how long it would take for her to die. _

_The bundle in the woman's arms began to scream. Cymbal wondered briefly if she'd been smuggling a cat, but not – it was a baby human. It waved its stubby, frantic fingers as the lesser demons pulled it away from the woman, who reached for it, grasping at air and making noises that Cymbal didn't have words for. The last thing he saw before they dragged her toward the bloody, flat piece of land where she was going to die were her eyes. She looked up at him – him, of all people – with a pleading, hopeful expression (he supposed because he was more humanoid than the reat of the creatures roaming around). Like she actually wanted HIM to do something about it. _

"_Not a lot of sense, these humans," he said to Tanbarin. _

_The woman shrieked as they stretched her out on the ground, licking their broken-off teeth. _

"_Not a lot of sense on this planet," Tanbarin replied. _

_Neither of them flinched. _

Cymbal opened his eyes.

He'd been napping on the lawn for the past hour or so, he figured, by the position of the sun. GETTING outside had been interesting. He'd finally hauled himself out of bed (two weeks, as it turned out, didn't TOUCH the amount of time he was going to have to spend flat on his back in recovery) earlier that morning and stumbled as far as the window. He moved like a drunk, legs still stiff, and it took him a minute to open the damned window; the glass felt heavy.

Then he realized he was on the second floor. Staring down at a perfectly kept little yard and a stand of trees. And if he could barely walk yet, there was no way he could fly.

He took a deep breath. He weighed a painful impact with the ground against the worry he was feeling because not only did he now know who Darren was, but he knew exactly what he'd done to Maria and he was afraid that he was _starting to care…_

Well, there was nothing for it but to take a deep breath and fall out a window. He hit the ground between his shoulder blades and flopped out and thought it was the most refreshing damned thing he'd done all week.

After he'd stopped seeing double, he'd more or less dragged himself to a quiet spot in the yard that got some direct sunlight, put his hands behind his head, and slept like the dead. The sun helped. It felt good on his shoulders, his busted-up abdomen, his newly-grown limbs. He tried to remember when the last time was he'd just napped in the sun for any length of time and decided he never had before. Too busy for one. For another, not a lot of direct sunlight in the frozen mountains.

He decided that he _liked _sunlight. And lazing around half-asleep in back yards.

Then he felt something light roll against his side and actually bothered to open an eye.

It was a soccer ball.

Instinctively he looked up. And yep, just as he'd expected. There was the little girl, hands on hips, staring down at him with an expression that hovered between expectant and hopeful.

Like she actually expected HIM to do something about it.

He closed his eyes and pretended to be asleep again.

The girl sighed and prodded him with her toe. She said something that his brain obligingly translated to "please."

"Beat it, kid," he said without opening his eyes.

She prodded at him again.

"What," he asked, resigned. He sat up on an elbow. "What could you POSSIBLY want now." Because they were no longer within reach of video games or weird plastic horses or books full of inane cartoon animals or any of the other millions of things that the little human had been determined to torment him with since he'd come to this hellish place.

The little girl put the toe of her shoe under the soccer ball, kicked it up in the air, and bounced it lightly from her knee to her head. Then she plopped it back onto the ground, kicked it his way, and looked at him imploringly.

"There aren't enough soap operas in the godsdamned WORLD to make me think THAT'S a good idea," he said.

The girl sighed more heavily than before, her small shoulders hunched forward until they almost touched.

"Demons don't play peewee soccer," he told her. "Now go find some other spastic little mammal to chase a ball with, will you?"

The girl didn't understand his language any more than he understood hers, he was sure, but she got the gist of it anyway. She picked her ball up and went to the other end of the yard to practice, and he stretched back out in the sun. And he wondered idly why there weren't any other spastic little mammals around for her to chase a ball with. Didn't the damned creatures live in packs?

The thought troubled him for some reason. But he had no idea why.

Across the yard, the little girl (Hina, his not-so-helpful brain supplied, because in spite of himself, he'd managed to pick up her name – her name and her mother's, which was Ami) kicked an imaginary goal and cheered for herself, jumping in circles and clapping. She tore up two handfulls of grass, threw them like confetti, and did a victory lap of a rose bush.

What a messed up breed of people, Cymbal thought. He would have been VERY annoyed to realize he was almost grinning as he thought it.

* * *

i Piccolo vs. Krillen, 23'rd Budokai 


	12. Chapter 12

It was an accident that Turles made it to earth first.

He wasn't sure how it had happened. Vegeta and Nappa had had quite a head start on him – he could only figure they'd stopped over somewhere on the way to stretch their legs, gotten distracted, taken longer than expected. Easy to do when Nappa was around. The big Saiyan had, as Vegeta was wont to exclaim, the attention span of a drunken gnat.

Nevertheless, here Turles was, and much sooner than he'd hoped for. He pushed the door of his pod open and looked at the vibrant green of this new world. It was, he noted, soft – the grass bent under his feet, and he could smell the wet, dark scent of crushed vegetation. Not like Vegiitasei, where grass was a sharp, stiff thing that could cut you, where trees were thorny and dense.

Turles adjusted his scouter and wondered what on this pitiful, soft planet could have killed Raditz.

Not that he was all that sorry to see Raditz go. They'd known each other back on the old planet Vegeta before everything had gone to Hell – they'd started on a squad together near thirty years ago. Raditz had made no bones about hating him right away. He found out later it was because he looked so much like Raditz's father.

Turles didn't know what kind of daddy-issues Raditz might have had. Nor did he much care. But as time went on, they worked well together. Raditz was a barbarian, but a strangely tactical one; as long as he had Turles around to yank his chain when he got too caught up in playing with his food to notice critical details (such as reinforcements arriving at a rapid pace and cutting off their retreat), then he was as effective as could be expected, Turles guessed.

They had not been friends. They had not, in fact, seen each other since Turles, annoyed beyond words at the prancing, undignified nature of most of Frieza's high-ranking officers, had quietly and discreetly put in a request for transfer to Coola's army. Frieza was amused enough at the idea to agree – Coola apparently had less regard for monkeys than his brother did.

Vegeta, Turles remembered, had not been pleased. Not that the snooty little prince had said as much. He'd just turned his back on Turles, crossed his arms, and tapped a bicep with his white, white glove. "What do I care what you do with your low-class carcass," he'd growled. "Go do what you want."

But his tail had been bristled, his back had been stiff, and he'd felt the betrayal, Turles knew. He might have tried to explain that it was best, what he was doing. That being the last of them, they needed to not have all their eggs in one basket. But they were Saiyans and they didn't talk about such things, so he'd bared his teeth at Nappa and Raditz (kind of a customary goodbye and fuck you both at once) and he'd left.

Now Raditz was dead, and Vegeta and Nappa were headed straight toward whatever had killed him, and Turles thought to himself that it was a wonder his race hadn't gone completely extinct eons ago with THOSE kinds of instincts.

He supposed that meant it was up to him to gather some intel. With a put-upon sigh, he pushed a button on his scouter, searching for Raditz's last known location.

As expected, he wasn't far off. Turles walked slowly over a rise on the soft, soft grass and came to what was left of his former squad-mate. The form in question was charred almost beyond recognition. Scavengers had done their work…bone showed through, so dry even the flies had moved on. The hair mostly remained, though…matted with water and dirt, plucked at by birds, but it was there, waving quietly in the breeze off the river.

Turles looked down at the empty sockets that had once been Raditz's eyes and thought for no particular reason about a time when he'd passed out cold in some sort of lake, only to have Raditz haul him out by the hair, give him a good shake, and snap at him for being incompetent. Like he was one to talk anyway.

I should report, he thought. Nevermind that the prince would probably not take his call.

Instead, he pressed another button on his scouter.

The reading of power levels was, to say the least, puzzling. He saw two big ones to the west, a small cluster of three that were considerable, but lesser, to the far east…and one big one, comparable with the first two, way off down south by itself.

None of them seemed strong enough for Raditz. But maybe a few together, maybe if they'd surprised him.

The three to the far east were closest. Turles bent his knees and took off toward them.

* * *

"No," Master Roshi said for the fourteenth time that day. "I will NOT teach you the Kame Hame Ha. Not yet."

Krillen sipped at his almost-empty drink, carefully noisy, and slid his eyes over to Chichi. He could only see her back, as she was standing at the sink and washing dishes in a clearly-aggravated manner. "Why not," she said.

Krillen looked back at Master Roshi. The old turtle hermit was clearly flabbergasted at his newest student – Chichi was, unlike most, completely unwilling to defer to her master's "superior" knowledge.

"Because you're not ready for it, that's why! Bejeebus, woman, you're likely to fry us all if you don't learn some basic energy control first."

"You taught Goku when he was twelve years old," Chichi said. A dish crumbled in her hands and Krillen winced.

"I did NOT teach it to him!" Roshi exclaimed, waving his hands for emphasis. The old turtle-hermit was beside himself, near-dancing in agitation. "He figured it out! He figured it out against my advice while I was standing next to him saying 'Goku, don't do it,' that's how he learned it! And he nearly killed us all when he did, might I add."

Chichi huffed again and set another dish – one of the lucky few survivors – in the drying rack. "Listen, old man, I don't have time for this. My son is out there with that monster Piccolo and I'd like to get him back before it's time for him to go off to college. And besides, who knows where he is, what he's doing to him…"

Krillen was grateful that both Master Roshi and Chichi were ignoring him as he couldn't hide the guilty rush of blood to his cheeks. He looked down at his lemonade glass and for one of the few times ever thanked the gods that no one ever seemed to notice him. Because he knew exactly where Gohan was and what was happening to him.

And sure, he felt bad about not telling Chichi that, while Gohan was with Piccolo, he was actually fine. Or as fine as you can be when Piccolo is regularly beating on you, anyway. But Krillen had good reasons for not mentioning it. One, Chichi wouldn't have believed him when he said that Gohan was okay with Piccolo – that he actually, against all odds, really seemed to like the cranky demon. Two, if he told her that he knew where they were, someone would eventually make him take them there, and in no way was that gonna end well. Chichi would demand to take Gohan back; Piccolo wouldn't want to let her. If he DID give the boy up, then Gohan would lose out on the training that Krillen could see pretty well that he needed. If he didn't, then Piccolo and Chichi were going to fight, and Krillen didn't want to explain to Goku how he'd managed to let his wife get killed right in front of his six-year-old son.

No, okay, that wasn't true. Because Krillen just didn't think Piccolo would kill Chichi. It was more, if he was being honest with himself, that he didn't want to put Piccolo through that right now. The big demon was grieving – sure, it had taken Krillen a while to figure that out. Because Piccolo didn't grieve like normal people. The symptoms were easy to mistake for just being physically hurt: Piccolo kept going off by himself. Drifting off mid-conversation, walking by himself at night, even sitting quietly and staring at nothing in particular in a way that only pretended to be meditation Krillen thought at first that it was just taking Piccolo longer than usual to recover from his latest fight. But no, even after he was obviously fine - it couldn't be anything else. True, Krillen didn't know whether he was grieving more for his family or, impossible as it seemed, Krillen's old friend Goku (or, he admitted to himself, it could be both), but whatever it was, Piccolo seemed determined to deal with it on his own.

And sometimes, when Krillen spent the night out there, he would watch the way that Gohan set his head on Piccolo's thigh or curled up to doze in his shadow, and he'd want for some inexplicable reason to offer to help. He knew that's what Goku would have done, even if he knew that Piccolo would turn him down cold. But Krillen never offered. He didn't know how.

"Goku knew the Kame Hame Ha better than I do," Roshi said firmly. "And he still has his hands full with Piccolo. One extra little trick isn't going to change anything, Chichi. I understand your frustration, but you can't rush these things. You'll just get yourself killed, and I don't want that on my conscience."

"I don't give a damn about your conscience," Chichi said. Another dish crackled – pieces of it pinged off the counter on their way to the trash. "Where was your conscience when my Goku went off to fight with those monsters by himself?"

"Confound it all, woman, I wasn't even there! And even if I had been, what good would it have done – **he** never listened to me, either! None of them did!"

Krillen sighed and turned his head to look out the window, familiar enough with his old master's speech about disrespectful, reckless students that he could safely tune out for a while. He knew they'd eventually get loud enough that they wouldn't notice when he snuck out to go work with Piccolo and Gohan…and that they'd attribute his disappearance to his natural dislike for arguments (cowardice, Bulma would suggest, but what did she know anyway). Until then…

Krillen blinked. Because unless he had finally gone completely nuts, there was a very familiar person just now landing on the beach outside the Kame house.

Goku looked different, for sure, His skin was a few shades darker – which Goku's never seemed to get, not even when he was out in the sun all the time – and he was dressed funny, almost exactly like Raditz had been, with a slab of tinted glass over one eye. Still, the face and the hair were unmistakably those of Krillen's childhood friend.

"Goku?" he said, slowly and quietly.

He realized belatedly that both Chichi and Master Roshi had stopped arguing to stare at him. And his first impulse, for some reason, was to just grin, wave both hands, and say sorry, he'd been daydreaming, _what_ had he said? But instead he sat very, very still and took another noisy sip from his drink.

"What is it, Krillen," Chichi asked in her too-calm voice. The one that had always sent Goku running the other way.

Krillen's stomach flip-flopped, and he nodded at the window.

Both Chichi and Master Roshi gathered at the table to look out at the beach. Where Goku was still standing, hands on hips, looking out over the ocean as if he'd never seen it before. And like that, Chichi was out the door and running toward him, and Krillen felt like he had done something very stupid somehow.

Master Roshi seemed to think so, too. He followed more cautiously, his expression impossible to see behind the sunglasses. And Krillen almost followed, but didn't. Some small instinct told him he should wait and see.

* * *

Turles had never seen a base quite like this one before.

Now he'd seen some stupid things. Floating cities, cities with guns that would only fire one way, military bases built on fragile sides of cliffs that were easily demolished with a well-placed chi blast.

But he couldn't for the life of him figure out why three of the highest energy readings on the planet were sitting on an island smaller than most living rooms in the middle of the ocean. Gods above, a good wave would destroy the place, and any self-respecting invading force would exchange high-fives and go home for dinner early.

Not to mention that he'd just been able to LAND here – here, ten feet from the front door of the house, ankle-deep in the water – and no one had yet come attacked him in any way, or seemed to notice him at all.

As if on cue, the door to the house burst open, and Turles turned to see…well, his first thought was that it was a Saiyan woman running down the island to meet him, except that there weren't any other sayians, and none of them were women.

Nonetheless, she LOOKED Saiyan – compact and strong, not delicate like the women of most species. And, in a strangely-accented voice, she was yelling at him, "Goku! Goku!"

He absently wondered if that was some kind of bizarre earthling greeting or curse. He turned himself fully to face the woman in question – much to his surprise, she didn't even slow down. He thought that she intended to run right into him as if they were lovers and thought to himself that this was the strangest world he'd ever been on. Nevertheless, when she jumped, he caught her. And the woman wound her arms around his neck, near-sobbing. He only understood half the words as they all came out in a rush: So glad you're back, but we didn't use the dragonballs, how did you – no, I don't care, I'm just so glad you're finally here, Goku, I've missed you.

So either the woman was a lunatic, he thought, which given where she was living was not outside the realm of possibility, or she was mistaking him for someone else. Someone who had to be Saiyan. He could never have passed for Raditz, Vegeta, or Nappa, but hadn't there been another one? The one Raditz kept growling on and on about, maybe, his little brother who was sent to some backwater planet just before Vegitasei bit it.

Then an old man came toddling out of the house, and Turles decided he'd ponder his current case of mistaken identity another day. The old man was a skinny, ancient creature with knobby knees, but Turles's scouter warned him that he was dangerous. Worse, from the bunching up of his forehead, Turles could tell that the older fighter had realized that something was wrong. So, with a small, grim smile, Turles flattened his hand at the old man and, before he could say a word, he blew his head clean off his shoulders.

* * *

Piccolo knew something was wrong before Krillen landed.

He felt the energies surging off to the east and, while they were nothing like the chi battles he'd experienced a few months ago, they were still at a high enough level to warrant concern. He felt one large, unfamiliar power flare briefly like a pair of headlights on a dark road, then gone, and the air felt stormy afterward.

_A training exercise, maybe, _he thought to himself…though deep down, he knew that wasn't true. He'd felt the old turtle hermit's energy sputter and die.

He was so distracted by wondering what might have happened that Gohan managed to land a square shot to his jaw. He staggered back a step or two, swiped the back of his hand across his lips, and shot the boy what he figured was a more indignant look than the small success warranted.

Gohan looked up at him, wide-eyed. "But sir, I thought I was _supposed_ to hit you!"

Piccolo made up his mind then and there that he was simply not cut out to be a parent. Or babysitter. Or whatever. "Not now, Gohan," he said, because the kid was right, and he didn't know how to express that in a way that didn't immediately offend his dignity.

Gohan had huffed and settled in beside him, arms crossed in what Piccolo assumed was an unconscious mimicry of his pose. At least, he assumed that until Gohan peered up at him, adjusted his stance slightly, and made his best effort to glare at the sky the same way that he was.

_I'm going to have a lot of explaining to do if I ever give you back, kid, _he thought wryly.

Which brought up the awkward question of what the Hell he was going to DO with the brat, anyway. Because, if he really thought about it…with Cymbal, Drum, and Piano gone, what did the kid really have to worry about anyway besides (possibly) Tanbarin?

And was learning how to throw punches really going to help the kid all that much with his older brother, Piccolo wondered. Granted, Gohan needed to learn some control to keep from vaporizing himself (and everyone else), but that would probably come with age and time, and if there wasn't an immediate threat…

Piccolo looked down at the little monkey beside him and wondered if maybe it wasn't time for the kid to go back to his mother. The idea was, for some reason, acutely painful, which probably meant that it was the right thing to do.

Then he spotted a distant dot that had to be Krillen. The dot, he thought, was moving too fast, and it was too bright.

"Stand still," he told Gohan. Then he walked forward several long paces to get some distance between himself and the boy.

Krillen landed badly, with a little stumble that threw gravel and dirt against Piccolo's shins. The small monk doubled over, resting his hands on his knees and panting. He was shiny with sweat. Piccolo felt his stomach tie itself into a slow, elaborate knot.

"Well?" he said.

"It's Goku," Krillen said in a hushed voice. He looked past Piccolo to see if Gohan was listening in and squinted his eyes, giving a small, quick nod when he decided the kid was out of earshot.

Piccolo's stomach moved from knotting to perhaps weaving. He raised an eyeridge. "Go on."

"He's back somehow," Krillen said. His voice was even quieter, and Piccolo realized that it was less out of concern for Gohan's hearing ability and more out of an effort to keep his voice from jumping and shaking like a teenager's. "But he's not himself. He looks different, his energy is strange, and…" Krillen took a deep breath. "And he killed Master Roshi," he said.

Piccolo took a deep breath of his own. He couldn't process what Krillen was telling him. Because it was impossible that Son Goku would be on earth – it was even more impossible that he would murder his old teacher. By the same token, he _knew_ Krillen – he knew him better than he wanted to admit. And Krillen wouldn't be out in the middle of the desert having a panic attack if he didn't think what he was saying was the absolute truth.

"Anything else?" Piccolo asked, startled at the calm in his own voice.

Krillen looked up at him as if he'd lost his mind, which Piccolo had expected, as that was a question he was asking himself, as well. What he _didn't_ expect was the other element of the monk's expression. Piccolo had seen Gohan look at him that way. The kid had had that same look when he'd found a sparrow that had hurt itself on the rocks, when he'd gotten a splinter, when he had those dreams that involved red-eyed creatures and men with long, rough manes. It was a hopeful expression, almost, one that said, "Please fix it."

"Chichi's gone," Krillen said. "He took her with him."

Of course, the question on the tip of Piccolo's tongue was why in Hell anyone would WANT that crazy woman. But then he remembered when he and Son Goku had first met Raditz. When Raditz had thrown Chichi aside, snapped her arm with an audible crunch…the particular look on Son Goku's face when he knelt next to her.

Piccolo looked over his shoulder at Gohan, who was visibly trying not to look like he was straining to hear. The boy, he thought incongruously, doesn't actually look much like his father. No, Gohan's eyes were narrower for his face, more almond-shaped…his chin was a little more square. His whole frame, in fact, was sturdier than Son Goku's, his hair less wild. He looked, Piccolo thought, so much more human than Son. So much more like his mother.

Piccolo turned his head back to Krillen, who was still looking up at him expectantly, and he said, more quietly than he'd probably said anything in his life, "How bad is it, Krillen."

Krillen blinked at the use of his name, but said, "She fought him, Piccolo. I didn't stick around." The monk looked down at the ground. "I mean, I wanted to help, but he's…he's stronger than he was. There's nothing I could've done."

Piccolo nodded curtly. Then he closed his eyes. He was lining two images up in his mind: Son Goku, after they'd brought Gohan back from the Tsubris. The way he'd put his hand on his wife's back as if he'd been afraid of breaking her.

In opposition to it, he put the mental image of his rival punching the woman in the face. He couldn't reconcile the image in his head.

"I need to see this," Piccolo said.

Krillen opened his mouth.

"I believe you," Piccolo said before the monk could speak. "But I need to see it for myself. Stay with Gohan."

Before Krillen could argue, Piccolo closed his eyes. He took a deep breath and looked for an energy signature that did not belong. It was closer than he would have liked, moving toward Poazu.

Piccolo took a short run to get into the air. As the desert spun away beneath him, he thought he heard Krillen yell, "But what the heck do I tell Gohan?"

Piccolo ignored him.

* * *

The forest trail was uneven and difficult to run on. For what felt like the hundredth time in the past few minutes, Cymbal slowed to a walk, resting his hand against a tree for balance. His lungs were burning pitifully early; his limbs, while fully grown-in, still felt rubbery and stiff from all the time he'd been forced to spend lying around. It was, he decided, a little bit like trying to work out when you're drunk and half asleep. He shook his head irritably and decided if he was going to be this out of shape, he might as well be human.

Of course, if he was going to be human, he thought he'd probably need to bang his head on a tree for a while to get the mindset right. Living with that woman and the little girl had been like a case study on the suicidally insane as far as Cymbal was concerned. Take that morning, for instance. He had been sitting in the living room – for reasons he did not understand – while the girl pushed buttons on a box that apparently made a small, red-clad man drive a golf cart (he wished he was kidding).

The woman came into the living room. She had smiled brightly at him, which Cymbal was rapidly coming to recognize as a bad sign. He looked at her warily.

The woman said something he couldn't follow. She was wearing an apron.

Cymbal gave her a blank look. He flinched as he heard something else explode on-screen.

The woman shrugged, but didn't seem less smiley. She came over, took his hand in both of hers, and gave him a firm pull toward the kitchen.

Cymbal sighed. "Insert obligatory protests about demons and kitchens."

Predictably, the woman ignored him. Cymbal wondered if he had not in fact died in the river and this was the form that Hell had chosen to take for him, but he did not voice this. "So, lady," he said.

She didn't miss a beat. She handed him a mixing bowl and a spoon.

"I don't know if you've noticed. But that kid's hit everything on that course."

She cracked two eggs, dumped in some flour.

"I mean, sometimes she crashes into the same thing three or four times."

She patted his hand as if to say not-to-worry. Then she dumped in a cup of sugar.

"And I was wondering…is she going to drive one of these days?"

She added a cup of milk.

"Because I don't mind telling you, the thought of that? Scares me."

He winced at the sound of another explosion from the living room. "Then again," he said dryly, "she might have some career openings in my old line of work."

The woman gestured to the bowl, then to the spoon, and Cymbal suddenly realized what was happening. "Oh no," he said. He shoved the bowl and spoon toward her. "This isn't happening."

The woman had, without flustering, without concern, pushed the bowl and the spoon back at him. This had continued for several minutes. Finally, in exasperation, Cymbal had all but bellowed, "I am NOT baking COOKIES!"

The woman had looked up at him with such a clear expression of surprise, concern, and hurt that he'd actually been afraid she was going to cry like one of the crazy women on the soap operas, who can go from zero to sprinkler in twelve seconds flat. And he wasn't sure what he was supposed to do about that – if he was supposed to smack her around until the hysterics stopped, as had always been standard procedure when he was dealing with POW's, or if he should pat her on the back or magically produce flowers like those idiots on television, or if there was some kind of written protocol for women who were leaking.

Cymbal had rolled his eyes up to the ceiling. He'd picked up the bowl. And he'd started stirring.

A few hours later, there were cookies (which he slipped to the donkey when no one was looking. He had no idea what the Hell cookies would do to his digestive system, and he had no intention of finding out). And a little after that, he'd slipped out for a run, mostly to clear his head.

It probably would have worked better if he hadn't had company. Already, he could hear the small footsteps getting closer, and pretty soon, the girl had caught up to him.

She was wearing the same workout clothes she wore to chase her ball around, and she was clearly more winded than he was. Her small face was flushed almost the color of the little cart-man's clothes, and her ponytail was coming undone. She almost stumbled when she stopped beside him.

Cymbal looked over at the kid appraisingly. He was far from the top of his game, but he figured they were about a mile out from the house. He hadn't expected her to make it that far.

He thought about telling her to buzz off, but that never helped anyway. Instead, he pushed off the tree, took a deep breath, and took off for the house. He didn't have the muscle control for a sprint or anything close to a sprint, but he had longer legs than a human, and out-of-shape for him was still a pretty damning pace for a girl with maybe a two-foot stride. He heard the footsteps get fainter and fainter as he stretched himself out.

He left her well behind him. When he got back to where the trail fed into the yard, he couldn't even see her – just a winding strip of dirt that disappeared into trunks and tree branches. And he almost went back to the house, but something made him wait, arms crossed, in the place between sunlight and shade. He wanted to see if she finished.


End file.
